AN ORAL HISTORY OF BILL LAIMBEER’S COMBAT BASKETBALL
Bruce Manhoof (Bill Laimbeer’s agent 1984–1993): I got a call from a rep at some video game company telling me they were interested in Bill. I wasn’t sure about it, but I knew they were selling video games like hot cakes. My kids had number munchers and they would not stop. Every night I’d fight with them about it. “That’s it,” I’d say, “you’ve munched your last freaking numbers.”
Kevin “Gamemaster Kevin” Entleman-Kevin (Nintendo Power basketball editor, 1987–1997): The basketball games in the 1980s usually had a little star power attached, so it was weird to see one tied to a lesser-known player like Laimbeer. There was Jordan vs. Bird, Magic vs. Bird, Jordan vs. Magic, and Bird vs. Bird (this was controversial because the game was supposed to star Larry Bird against various Larry Birds from alternate dimensions but was never released in the United States because it was also the name of a banned cockfighting simulator).
Bill Laimbeer (NBA player, 1979–1993): The first thing I said was this takes place in a violent, dystopian future nightmare world. That was non-negotiable.
Rick Oils (Hudson Soft directory of American marketing, 1986–1992): So we had this idea for a sort of “no rules” basketball game that they were developing in Japan. When I heard about it, I started jokingly calling it the Bill Laimbeer Game. I grew up in Cleveland and am a huge Cavs fan, so I had seen my fair share of Bill kneeing Mark Price in the testicles; it just became a private joke to us. But then I thought, why not, why not see if we can throw him on this thing and make a few goofy commercials?
Laimbeer: Look, when you explain to people that you are into dystopian technological futures everyone assumes that you’re into Neuromancer. What do I look like, a churl?
Manhoof: I didn’t hear back from Bill about the whole game thing until I got a giant package delivered to my house. It said “Codex of Combat Basketball Rituals, Government, and Economy.” It had a goddamn appendix. Again here we go with this shit, I thought.
Laimbeer: I’ve long had the idea for a dystopian future society (“cyberpunk” if you must use that term) for awhile, something to think about on those long lonely nights on the road. Sometimes, when I was sneakily kicking Dave Corzine in the shins, I could envision myself actually using a futuristic technique to “hack” my way into his shins and make him feel the force of a kick. I had written these things down from time to time and sent them to Manhoof to see if he could get any traction from his connections in the entertainment world.
Manhoof: I had seen by that time at least three novellas, two screenplays, and a line of action figures that all took place in the same future world called like Giagantia where people were having sex with computers or something. Frankly, it was pretty out there shit. I kept telling him to try to get…I mean I couldn’t get him Burger King but maybe I could get him in a Hardee’s commercial elbowing a fake Ronald McDonald or something.
Laimbeer: The world of Gargantua (a play, of course, on Mantua, a city Shakespeare often referenced) was almost a film noir setting, one of corruption and redemption and always-punished acts of heroism set in the near-ish future. Some stories were crime capers others were psycho-sexual meditations on the interactions of people with technology. I bet Manhoof mentioned those first.
Oils: I was expecting a quick meeting where we’d slap Laimbeer’s name on the game, reference him a few times, and cut him a check. Instead, he shows up with detailed dossier on the nature on the fallout from the Cyber-Wars of 2015 and how that affected the basketball combat. “We need them to shoot rockets at people,” he said, before sliding me an Index of Futuristic Haircuts.
Dave Jabbaarth (Hudson Soft United States market translation and localization 1988–92): I got more and more skeptical that we could actually sign Laimbeer because there was no way to deliver what he promised, but then he did something I’ve never seen.
Oils: I said to him I think we might want to go in a different direction.
Laimbeer: I looked the software guy right in the eye and told him “let me show you.”
Manhoof: Bill asked me “should I show him?” and I knew what was coming and said no, but he was already loping towards the guy.
Oils: He told me he was setting a pick and to go around him. Now the last time I ever played ball was in junior high and normally this kind of thing with an NBA player, you know, that’s some good horsing around. Something to tell the guys at the office. But not with Laimbeer, man. He had a completely insane look in his eyes.
Jabbaarth: So this guy is huge, right. Like, seven feet tall and not a beanpole. And there’s Rick with this dumb smile on his face sort of trying to go around him when he screamed and fell down.
Oils: I didn’t even see him move, but it felt like he had punched me and kicked me in the scrotum at the same time.
Laimbeer: That’s how he learned the art of combat basketball.
Oils: After that we said sure we’ll sign the deal just to get them out of there.
Laimbeer: All collaborations, especially with a video company, require some compromise, but it was important to me that I could realize my creative vision. After all, it was going to be Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball, and my fans understand that they will be getting a product that has the type of quality they can expect from Bill Laimbeer.
Jabbaarth: This dude kept real weird hours. Sometimes the phone would ring at three AM, and it’s Laimbeer telling me about how he modeled the government in Gargantua after the Napoleonic Directorate. Sometimes I’d get books called “Combat Basketball Lore, v. 12.” They’d be professionally bound. Meanwhile I’m calling Japan and asking them if they can maybe add a few pixels to make a guy look like he shooting a rocket out of his forehead that we could tell Laimbeer was the representation of the “psychic mind explodium” that he thought would give what he told me would be an “interesting sort of paranormal dimension to the whole thing.”
Entleman-Kevin: I remember getting that review cartridge at the Nintendo Power offices, but I wasn’t that interested. There were a number of titles around that time about sports with all sorts of violent dimensions featuring robots or mutants or robotic mutants, so I wasn’t expecting anything that different. Then I got a package from Bill Laimbeer.
Laimbeer: I just wanted to get a little bit more of the story out there. In the game, of course, you know that I am the basketball commissioner and am encouraging players to murder each other, but I figured people engaging with the game might want to know how the world had gotten into that state. I wanted them to be able to smell, touch, and feel Gargantua (it isn’t called that in the game, but in fact that is the canonical city-state where it takes place) through my own literary efforts.
Manhoof: Oh Jesus, that book. I told him Bill don’t send the book.
Entleman-Kevin: I skimmed through it and it got me interested in the game. But I wasn’t nearly as into it as “Rad” Dave, another reviewer. I gave him the book and he came in the next day yelling “who wants to play basketball?” Rad Dave had never willingly played basketball in his life but he had this ball and he kept screaming “We’re playing Laimbeer Rules” and whipping it at someone’s head and then cracking up. There was so much coke around Nintendo Power back then.
Laimbeer: The video game really sparked my vision for an entire world.
Entleman-Kevin: I believe I said the game was “pretty cool” but “could be more bodacious.”
Manhoof: We somehow negotiated for the film rights to Combat Basketball and I spent most of ’92 and ’93 trying to sell this screenplay. It was humiliating.
Laimbeer: My agent was not at home in the literary or cinematic worlds, so I had to take it upon myself to move it. I finally found a buyer. But that would be the start of my misery.
Pat Riley (Head coach of the New York Knicks in 1991): I have to be honest, I bought the thing, I was mainly interested to see if he had anything interesting to say about elbowing technique.
Laimbeer: Riley didn’t even try to get it produced. And when I offered to buy it back, he told me I was ineffectual, disloyal, and not a man.
Riley: I told him he was ineffectual, disloyal, and not a man. That’s when he escalated.
Laimbeer: I made a plaster cast of my right elbow (the Cartwright Clobberer, I called it) and sent it to Riley. I think the meaning was clear.
Riley: Do you think that’s the first time someone’s threatened me with the plaster cast of their own elbow? Please. Amateur.
Laimbeer: For the last few years, I’ve been working on a sequel: Bill Laimbeer’s Excessively Violent Future-Coaching. No bites yet, but I’ve got about three volumes that really expand on the entire Combat Basketball universe and bring the series up to handle the numerous, uh, quandaries raised by technology in the twenty-first century.
Oils: No one in the video game industry will ever work with Bill Laimbeer again, and you can print that.
Entleman-Kevin: Fuckin’ Laimbeer Rules. Almost broke my goddamn nose.
