Bonus Drop: “Cover Story” Destiny’s Child print
Also: Todd MacCulloch remembers his SLAM cover appearance and being on the wrong end of a Slamadamonth
Hi everyone. Welcome to my newsletter companion to “Cover Story,” a basketball book I wrote which is set for release on October 19th and is available for pre-order here. If you want to tell your followers about my book, feel free to share this tweet or this Instagram post. If you’re not a newsletter subscriber, click here to make sure you get every post in your inbox.
One of my favorite magazine covers growing up was the 2000 ESPN the Magazine NBA preview issue cover featuring Steve Francis and Destiny’s Child. It is one of those cover images which perfectly captures a very specific moment in time. Francis was the man who spurned the Vancouver Grizzlies and pouted on national television on draft night before he was traded to the Houston Rockets and won co-Rookie of the Year (with Elton Brand). Destiny’s Child was an up-and-coming R&B group who went through several iterations of singers in the early years. One of those singers ended up becoming a pop culture icon and one of the most famous people in the world.
The cover is the focus on one of the chapters in “Cover Story.” While I interviewed editor Jerry Bembry about pitching the cover idea and talked to photographer Marc Baptiste about the cover shoot, the “Destiny’s Child” chapter is really about the concept of merging basketball and hip-hop on the newsstand for the mainstream; a journey which I traced back to a 1992 cover of The Source featuring Charles Barkley and Spike Lee.
The release of “Cover Story” is less than a month away (!!). To celebrate this momentous occasion in literature history, I’ve collaborated with a group of ultra-talented people on a series of merchandise drops.
(By the way, when I used the word collaborate, what I mean is I asked people whose work I admire if they wanted to give me some of their valuable time to be part of my book release. But seriously: thank you, everyone.)
Each of these bonus pieces will have a specific tie-in to the book. Today, I’m happy to share our first drop. My friend Dana aka @greatdanedraws has a “Cover Story” Destiny’s Child print (pictured above) which is now available for purchase at her Etsy store here. As much as I appreciate everyone’s support for my book, it would mean even more to me if you showed some love to my friends as well.
Per the unwritten rules of this newsletter, I had to hit Dana up and ask about her favorite magazine covers.
Her first pick is this 2014 ESPN the Magazine Music Issue cover featuring Kendrick Lamar and Chris Paul (which.. shows the continued evolution of hip-hop and basketball merging for a mainstream audience). “I practiced piano, alto saxophone, and was in a choir growing up, so I was pretty weird, but I’m grateful music has been a part of my life,” Dana told me. “Kendrick is one of my favorite artists, and while he’s no Kyle Lowry, Chris Paul is a cool player.”
Next up is a 2014 Esquire magazine cover featuring Danny DeVito. “An explanation isn’t needed here. It's just really funny,” Dana explained. “I suppose because my career is in eye care, I gravitate toward anything featuring unique glasses too.”
And finally, Dana picked this 1999 ESPN the Magazine cover featuring Vince Carter (the alternate cover for the same issue was pretty sick too). She says this cover epitomizes the earliest days of her Raptors fandom. “I was 7-years-old when Vince posed for this cover,” Dana said. “He played a large role in shaping my malleable little brain into one that loved the game of basketball and the Toronto Raptors.” She also correctly calls out the very distinctly year 2000 aesthetic of the cover, calling it “a mixture of a Pierce Brosnan James Bond movie, Q-Tip album cover, and the YTV title font.”
Thanks again Dana for coming up with such an amazing “Cover Story” print design. Make sure you follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
Before we wrap up, I wanted to tell you about my conversation with Todd MacCulloch last week. If you don’t remember MacCulloch, he was born and raised in Winnipeg, attended the University of Washington, and was drafted in the second round by the Philadelphia 76ers in 1999.
After retirement, MacCulloch became a pro pinball player. When we caught up over Zoom last week for an interview (for another project I’m working on), MacCulloch gave me a quick tour of all the pinball machines in his basement. I’m happy to confirm he is still just as passionate about his hobby today.
Before we wrapped up our interview, I told him about “Cover Story” and how there was an entire chapter devoted to SLAM’s 1998 Generation Nets cover, which featured the starting lineup of the New Jersey Nets and (inaccurately) predicted the team would be NBA champions by 2001.
SLAM decided to put the Nets on the cover again (pictured above) in 2002. MacCulloch, the team’s starting center at the time, remembers walking into practice and seeing SLAM setting up for the cover shoot.
“I got word they wanted the starters for the photoshoot,” he recalled. “I was feeling really inadequate. I was like, ‘Really? Me too?’ Like [Jason] Kidd, [Kerry] Kittles, [Keith] Van Horn, and Kenyon [Martin]. I get it. But MacCulloch? I didn’t feel like I belonged on the cover. I was like, ‘Do they really want me there?’”
MacCulloch did make the cover, but when he picked up the following month’s issue of SLAM, he flipped to the “Trash Talk” section and saw a reader had wrote in and said: “Hey, how the hell did Todd MacCulloch end up on last month’s cover?”
“The editor’s response was, ‘Yeah, we’re still trying to figure that out ourselves,’” MacCulloch recalled. “I was like, ‘See! That’s why I was questioning it the whole time!’”
MacCulloch also remembers a funny story about how he made it into the the magazine’s Slamadamonth section.
Before a game against the Miami Heat, he ran into a photographer working for SLAM at the arena. “He told me, ‘Hey, I don’t have a good Slamadamonth yet. Try and dunk somebody. I’ll be under the basket to get a good photo,’” MacCulloch recalled.
That evening, the Nets center ran the fast break and saw a clear path to the basket for his poster moment. He still remembers the sequence today. Alonzo Mourning was trailing the play as MacCulloch soared for the dunk. “He thought he could block me,” he explained. “I went up and dunked it with two hands. There’s a photo of me hanging on to the rim while Alonzo is squinting, trying to protect himself from the ball.”
After the game, the photographer confirmed he had gotten a perfect shot of the dunk. MacCulloch believed he was the Slamadamonth favorite.
He was right. Well, kind of.
Shortly after, MacCulloch played against the Los Angeles Lakers and got dunked on by Kobe Bryant (video above). The slam was so emphatic it ended up being the Slamadamonth. When he ran into the photographer after the issue had come out, he told MacCulloch: “Hey, I told you you’d be in Slamadamonth. I didn’t say which end you were gonna be on though.”
All jokes aside, MacCulloch is still pretty amused at having been a cover star for the most popular basketball magazine in the world. “For a kid out of Winnipeg to be on the cover of SLAM is pretty ridiculous,” he said.
Thanks for reading the newsletter. Feel free to subscribe if it’s your first time reading. You can pre-order “Cover Story” here and find me on Twitter and Instagram. Email me if you want to chat.