Spider John Salley is like the Charlie Murphy of the NBA = moderately talented as a player but friends with virtually everyone that mattered and a human gold mine of stories. He has a new feature over at Deadspin that should be an excellent source for off the court insight.
His debut includes an amazing conversation with ex-Miami Heat center Rony Seikaly who asks Spider how he finds the motivation to play past April since that’s when the checks stop. Now in Rony’s defense he does live in South Beach, is holding down a certified dime piece (slam dunk, no assist) of a wife and has a second career as a DJ. (According to this article his specialty is “spaced-out electronic house music that makes you want to wash an Ecstasy pill down with a $12 Heineken as you sweat 12 pounds off at a velvet-roped nightclub“) Spider calmly explains to him that you play for pride and to win the championship but then reveals that he had never realized that they were playing two and a half months for free.
That was news to me and I found it hard to believe there wasn’t some kind of bonus system in place just based on all the ticket sales, tv revenue, etc. It turns out that nowadays yes, players DO get paid. But shout out to Rony Seikaly regardless. This man brokered an extremely average NBA career into every European male’s dream life.
I’ve been to a couple of Heat games over the last couple of years and I’ve always wondered why Rony Seikaly’s imprint isn’t visible anywhere. Here’s a guy who for five straight seasons averaged 16+ points and 10+ boards as a fairly narrow center for an expansion team. He was the team’s “star,” if such a word is even appropriate for him, and there’s hardly a sign of him anywhere in the arena. Now I know why.