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" ONCE, THERE WAS JIM BROWN, tossing the ball to the referee and walking that aged, humpty walk back to the huddle, and there was Bill Russell, Nehrued up and stroking that Du Bois beard of his, running with the slick crowd in Boston&amp;#039;s South End. There was Julius Erving, not necessarily as Dr. J. but as what one of Al McGuire&amp;#039;s old renegade forwards once called him: Julius from New York. There were Clyde Frazier and Earl the Pearl, names alone that were cool. There were big hats and mink coats, and sports seemed to swing. There was a bass line beneath the baselines, slow and steady and solid.  When did athletes stop being cool? American popular culture--based on cool the way blood is based on water--has conquered the known world as surely as Alexander&amp;#039;s armies ever did. We can move product; there&amp;#039;s no doubt about that. We can put CDs in Beijing, and we can put basketball in Canada--even in western Canada, where Canadians are proudest of being, well, Canadians. But that&amp;#039;s all sales and marketing, and sales and marketing are never cool, no matter how hard they try. Maybe we pick everything--art, literature, music, athletes--too soon. Maybe nothing really ages until it develops its own unique soul, which is the wellspring of cool.  When did athletes stop being cool? Maybe when the rest of us did.  Or maybe the country that invented cool just isn&amp;#039;t a cool country anymore.  It&amp;#039;s a terrible thing to contemplate.  And do not bring me any of the usual suspects. Keep your suburban midlife crises and demographic terrors to yourself, please. Dispense with all the moralizing that tracks popular culture the way mall dicks follow anyone who wears a hat backward. One can be dope and still be cool. Cool is not a zero-sum business. But everything is product now, and product is never cool. For example, the NBA&amp;#039;s problem is not that it is young and brash and loud. Cool can be young and brash and loud. Its problem is that it is inauthentic. The NBA stopped being cool when it decided to sell itself everywhere as everything to everybody. And that began in the putative Golden Era, when the league began to make its players caricatures of themselves. Magic and Larry. The Bad Boys in Detroit.  It became a cartoon show. Michael Jordan was a trademark before he was a champion. He was cool because Nike told us he was. It took him thirteen years and six championships to live that down, and by the time he left, nobody remembered how to be cool anymore. So few athletes work at it anymore, and so few of their chroniclers would know it if it fell on their heads; the concept has fallen almost completely into disuse.  Lo and behold, then, this man is cool, very cool, especially for a twenty-four-year-old in his fifth season out of California, which would&amp;#039;ve been only his second professional year if the old rules still applied. First of all, he looks cool--tall, slit-eyed, and faintly exotic. There is a vast difference between self-absorption and self-possession, and the measure of that distance is the measure of cool. This man is self-possessed. Jump up and down, thump your chest, bellow at the camera, and whom are you really trying to convince? The uncool world or your uncool self? &amp;quot;Basketball is what I do,&amp;quot; the man says. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s not who I am. I know who I am, even without basketball.&amp;quot; The voice is low and level, as solid as blue metal, and that&amp;#039;s cool, too. A slinky six nine, Shareef Abdur-Rahim provides no floor show. He runs fast and he jumps high. He drops little jumpers and running rainbow hooks, and he has a drop-step spin thing out of the low blocks that bears comparison to Hakeem Olajuwon&amp;#039;s, and Olajuwon was the Nureyev of the form. When the shot falls and someone has hacked him, he walks to the foul line, as impassive as marble.  His game isn&amp;#039;t borrowed--an Iverson crossover here, a Jordan cradle there. Its rhythm flows like a long wave, not like a percussive chop. It is long and coherent, structured and disciplined, a suite or a rhapsody, an expression of who he is and not who he sells himself to be. &amp;quot;The way I am is who I am,&amp;quot; he explains. &amp;quot;The passion I have for basketball doesn&amp;#039;t go into yelling and screaming. That&amp;#039;s not who I am. If I make a play, I take the mentality that I&amp;#039;m going to do it again. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m just more low-key, more in the cut, more chilled out. Let&amp;#039;s be honest: When you think about what I&amp;#039;m doing here, I&amp;#039;m playing basketball for a living, getting paid a good amount of money. On my worst day, I&amp;#039;m still blessed.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s a measure of how uncool the NBA is today that this is not enough. Shareef has been criticized for being too smooth, for being too polite. People read his face, and when they can&amp;#039;t see the fire, they presume it&amp;#039;s not there. There are people who wish he&amp;#039;d chew on a referee or take a swipe at an opponent or initiate a brawl, and these people wish it so openly that Shareef is moved to comment in almost every interview, &amp;quot;Look, I&amp;#039;m not as nice as people think I am.&amp;quot;  Early on, some marketing whizbang, trying to capitalize on his high school nickname, decided that Shareef would be called the Future, another character in the NBA&amp;#039;s misbegotten cartoon of itself. The name didn&amp;#039;t stick because the name was fake, and fake is not cool. Cool is never a stance; it is not a pose. Not now. Not ever.  The NBA is sampling everything and descending into cacophony. It&amp;#039;s trying on as many costumes as it can, slapping together an identity from a dozen disparate sources, waving for attention because it doesn&amp;#039;t have the faintest idea what it wants to be. Those TNT ads with the players as a jazz band are towering lies. The modern NBA wouldn&amp;#039;t recognize cool if Miles Davis came back from the dead and blew his horn into Hubie Brown&amp;#039;s ear. The whole point of cool--hell, the whole point of the country in which it was invented--is making the world come around to you on your own authentic terms. But strangely enough, it&amp;#039;s still there. Cool, that is. Stubborn and in an unlikely place, in a space between the mountains and the sea, its source far away, in a distant faith. This is where cool resides, for a while, anyway. The Last Cool Athlete plays in the Great White North.  AT FIRST, the Nation was cool. The clear eyes. The proper dress. Even the bow ties--on Malcolm X, backed up with all that badass stoicism, all that abstemious splendor, the bow ties somehow worked. Even the cops seemed wary, and some conservative politicians began making cooing noises about how the Nation frowned on the sins of the flesh, riding their moral-values bandwagon into some damned strange territory indeed. But in the Nation, people seemed to know who they were, and the world seemed to bend a little to that reality, and that was the coolest thing of all. Of course, later on, a great many people in the Nation realized that they were being played for suckers, and a great many of them passed through the Nation, finally, on their way to true Islam. Malcolm made the passage out of the Nation first, and he probably died for it. Muhammad Ali was still in the Nation when the bullets flew at the Audubon Ballroom, but he eventually found himself on the same spiritual journey to the same spiritual destination. In 1964, Wallace Muhammad broke with his father, the Honorable Elijah, saying that the old man was no prophet at all. All that stuff about blue-eyed devils, all the crackpot maunderings about Yacub and the spaceship, all of it sloughed away like old skin.  What stayed behind was the cool, rooted deeply in a sense of identity, an old and vast faith that began far from any American ghetto.  Shareef&amp;#039;s father, William Abdur-Rahim, joined the Nation at twenty-two. He learned to preach there. Over the next decade, he found himself moving off in the same way that so many people did, moving toward the older Islam. He made the whole journey, the way that Malcolm and Ali and Wallace Muhammad had, and he now serves as the imam of a Muslim congregation in Atlanta, where Shareef grew up in Islam but not in the Nation. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m a Muslim, not a Black Muslim,&amp;quot; he says, and it&amp;#039;s a pointed comment and a learned one, too.  It was a disciplined household, but not a particularly rigid one. His parents were far more protective of his sisters. Shareef went to public school, and he attended dances, and he hung out with his friends, who didn&amp;#039;t see anything particularly remarkable in the way he was raised. Today, he prays five times every day. He keeps the fast during Ramadan, rising before dawn to eat breakfast and to hydrate himself, playing the odd day game on an empty stomach. &amp;quot;Everybody grows up with guys now who are Muslims,&amp;quot; Shareef explains. &amp;quot;People know more about it. It&amp;#039;s more visible. People aren&amp;#039;t--I don&amp;#039;t want to use a bad word and call people ignorant--but just not knowing, the way they used to be.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s less freaky than it was,&amp;quot; says Sidney Lowe, Shareef&amp;#039;s coach with the Grizzlies, who knew kids from the Nation when he was growing up near Washington, D. C. &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re getting more and more people becoming Muslims, and, for the most part, they&amp;#039;re very serious about it. For the most part, you see those guys, and they&amp;#039;re humble and very loyal to people and to their faith.&amp;quot; As part of his ministry, William did community work and coached rec-league basketball. He brought Shareef everywhere with him, and the boy spent his time helping out at drug-rehab clinics and playing ball with older, tougher men. He moved on to Wheeler High School in suburban Marietta, and he was expected to move on to Georgia Tech. Instead, in 1995 he surprised everyone by committing to the University of California. At the time, the NCAA was intensely curious about the operation that Todd Bozeman was running in Berkeley. (Ultimately, Bozeman would lose his job and Cal would be hit with NCAA sanctions when the coach admitted to paying $30,000 to the father of another recruit.) Shareef&amp;#039;s decision was such a shock that it raised red flags in an organization that has closets full of them. He wound up having to go before an NCAA committee before he was allowed to play. He played one season at Berkeley, averaging twenty-one points and eight rebounds per game, and became the first freshman ever to be named Pac-10 Player of the Year. He enjoyed it tremendously, but the Bozeman regime was coming apart, and so Shareef threw himself into the 1996 NBA draft. The Grizzlies took him with the third pick that year. One of the first things that struck the NBA scouts was how ably, how coolly, he&amp;#039;d handled the turmoil at Cal while the program seemed be collapsing around him. &amp;quot;He&amp;#039;s a little deeper than most,&amp;quot; says Lowe. &amp;quot;His--I want to say maturity, but that&amp;#039;s not really it. It&amp;#039;s just qualities that are hard to find in guys his age. I think it&amp;#039;s partly his faith that makes him the way he is.&amp;quot; You can see it, as subtext mainly, when he talks about his parents. William and Aminah Abdur-Rahim split several years ago, and William now has five children with his second wife, the same number that he and Aminah produced. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s five between my father and mother,&amp;quot; Shareef says, his face wide and steady, choosing every word the way a musician might choose his notes. &amp;quot;And after my parents divorced, my father had five more. The total is ten, then. It was . . .&amp;quot; and his voice fades. The pause is a phrase in itself, as he works out how much he&amp;#039;s going to share. &amp;quot;Hard,&amp;quot; he says, and that&amp;#039;s the end of it, until he comes back later to what basketball means to him. &amp;quot;It was a place I could go,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;It was my outlet. Even when I was a kid and there might be problems at home, something on my mind, I always got to the court by myself. However long I was there, I didn&amp;#039;t have no problems.&amp;quot;  Shareef&amp;#039;s career has been one of steady improvement, particularly on defense, about which he&amp;#039;d arrived in the NBA virtually clueless. He smoothed out his offensive game, refining a variety of moves, particularly at midrange, and working hard to become a good rebounder on a bad rebounding team. He has been loyal to the Grizzlies, a sixth-year expansion team that has yet to win twenty-five games in a season and an operation still so new that Shareef is already the team&amp;#039;s all-time leading scorer.  However, his loyalty was pushed hard this season. At the beginning of 2001, with Vancouver floundering again, reports began to surface that Shareef wanted to be traded to a contender and that the Grizzlies might be forced to make a deal to accommodate him. He was asked constantly about possible trades, often in such a way as to suggest that he disliked the Grizzlies, Vancouver, the dominion of Canada, or some combination of all three. To watch him handle this sort of thing is to see that stoicism in action, the stoicism that made the Nation cool but also brought people through the delusions of the Honorable one and toward a sturdier faith. There is no anger, or even frustration.  &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ll play regardless,&amp;quot; comes the voice, as cool and as solid as blue metal, from out of a knot of reporters. &amp;quot;I still need to play ball. Over the last two weeks, I&amp;#039;ve answered enough questions about this for now. If there&amp;#039;s no questions about the game, I&amp;#039;ll just go home and chill out.&amp;quot; The pitch never rises. The volume stays level. The eyes, set wide, betray not a thing.  THOSE OF US AFFLICTED with the NBA&amp;#039;s Eastern Conference can be forgiven if we believe that the league&amp;#039;s current product is possessed of all the intrinsic aesthetic value of a goat on roller skates. Out here, though, in the West, where teams still run, and where some of them still shoot, the difference is so stark that it almost looks as though there are two leagues, and one of them is as subordinate to the other as triple-A ball is to the majors. I mean, here we are, with the barely-out-of-expansion Grizzlies and the middle-of-the-pack Denver Nuggets, and the game seems to have been lifted whole out of some golden evening fifteen years ago. The game is a showpiece for two young stars, and that&amp;#039;s the way it used to be, too. Shareef spends the evening trading buckets with his good friend and Olympic teammate Antonio McDyess, the Denver power forward who begins the game as though he might go for seventy. He wears out Vancouver&amp;#039;s Othella Harrington, dropping short jump shots on his head, putting up sixteen points in the first quarter be-fore Shareef gets rolling at all. After falling behind 8--0, Vancouver gets back to a one-point lead at the quarter, despite McDyess&amp;#039;s performance. The two of them bonded during the Olympics last summer, in no small part because they were the cool ones on a very hot team. McDyess is more country cool, with a voice like aged molasses. A slow, old man&amp;#039;s voice, like something off one of those wax discs that Alan Lomax wandered around collecting for the Library of Congress. A different kind of cool than Shareef&amp;#039;s--a little more worn and simple, its spiritual home not a mosque but a clapboard church in the pines. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m quiet,&amp;quot; Shareef says. &amp;quot;But Dice, man, Dice wouldn&amp;#039;t say anything. Our rooms were next to each other in the hotel, and when we&amp;#039;d go out and do something as a team, Dice&amp;#039;d stay in his room. I made a point of knocking on his door.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I love Shareef,&amp;quot; McDyess says. &amp;quot;A great player and a great guy. He&amp;#039;s the kind of guy and the kind of teammate you want to see do well. Doesn&amp;#039;t mean I wouldn&amp;#039;t have liked to put sixty on him out there.&amp;quot; Shareef laughs at this. &amp;quot;Dice, he&amp;#039;s a load, but he isn&amp;#039;t dropping sixty on me.&amp;quot; Tonight, Shareef lets the game come to him. He&amp;#039;s a slasher and a driver now, becoming more like James Worthy than anyone else. Gradually, his points and rebounds pile up, but he doesn&amp;#039;t look any more or less emotional than he did during warm-ups. McDyess is more animated, a little bouncier, but neither one of them is redefining any dance steps. Vince Carter is probably more demonstrative brush-ing his teeth in the morning. Nevertheless, the two of them turn the game into a brilliant duel of running solos: Shareef all over the floor and McDyess ruining people low. It is something startling to realize that one has been transported again by professional basketball. Two young stars head-to-head, playing the game fast and free, scoring points by the bushel--the NBA should be able to sell this. There was a time, and not so long ago, when the NBA could&amp;#039;ve sold itself to cloistered monks in the Himalayas. Hell, it sold itself to Vancouver, which even the National Hockey League ignored for decades. Yet Denver is hardly ever on television, and Vancouver&amp;#039;s been on once in three years.  This, though, on this night, is the real product that made everybody so rich: a beautiful, nearly perfect context in which individual skills can blend and ignite.  Prune away all the silly hyperbole, ignore the bluenose William Bennett faction among the country&amp;#039;s sports hacks, and that&amp;#039;s what&amp;#039;s missing--the unique rhythms of uncompromised, idiosyncratic music, not the predictable whoop-thump of marketable product. You&amp;#039;ve got a league that desperately needs to be cool again. Which is not to say that it can&amp;#039;t also be dope or fresh or fly or phat. Cool is not a zero-sum business. It is itself alone, and its sources are not in the transitory glitter of the market. They are deeper than that. They run from those places in which people look for the transcendent. What was the coolest moment in NBA history? It was that All-Star game at the Forum in 1983, when they let Marvin Gaye do the anthem, and Marvin swung it and caressed it and turned that ghastly old English boozing melody into the purest soul. About halfway in, you could see the players begin to sway, one after another, and then all at once, literally moved by the music. Nobody jumped. Nobody posed. They all just moved. It&amp;#039;s there in his eyes as Shareef talks (again!) about whether he wants to be traded. He takes all the questions, and he&amp;#039;s dead level, still and calm, steady as the ripples in the bay, as cool as the ice on the mountains. 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<http://www.esquire.com/sports/a1397/rebirth-cool-0401/>