The Official Site of Jordan Farmar

Tue, Jan 13th 2009, 15:21

Jordan's Playboy.com blog - Five on 5: Week 9

January 20 and Inauguration Day are just around the corner. Meanwhile, we continue to have the best record (30-6) in the NBA, even with Lamar Odom, Luke Walton and myself out. The numbers combined for the three of us are 20.1 points, 10.2 rebounds and 6.5 assists per game. The team has been getting by with a short bench and one reason is that everyone is sacrificing for the overall goal. Another is Pau Gasol, who’s having an All-Star season.

People have been suggesting that Obama may give African-American youth something else to strive for, not just in music or pro sports. I absolutely agree with that. You have idols or role models as a young black kid, someone you can relate to and look up to. Usually, the successful and well-known ones aren’t politicians or businessmen, they’re usually athletes or entertainers. So to have somebody who’s taken a completely different path, who went to school and graduate school and got a profession, and then into politics in Obama’s case, then worked his way to be President, well he’s given young black kids — and other minority kids — a different perspective, something they may not have had before. He inspires them to strive for something beyond being an athlete or entertainer. Personally, I can’t wait for Inauguration Day on January 20, to hear President-elect Barack Obama’s speech, and to see where he’s going to take us.

Pau Gasol recently got his 10,000th career point, and I think he’s an All-Star one hundred percent. I hope he gets chosen by the coaching staff even if he’s not voted in by the fans. He’s extremely talented and has been our most consistent player. He’s very unselfish; he brings other players into the game. Did you see that dribble between his legs and no-look dish to Trevor Ariza for a dunk in the Jazz game. You wouldn’t see too many seven-footers do that. But he still finds a way to do his thing and score points.

For instance, in that Christmas Day showdown with the Celtics, he had seven key points and an important blocked shot down the stretch to help us win. We have the best player in the world on our team, in Kobe, so anyone could be over-shadowed by that. And our team from top to bottom is very good, and everyone’s individual numbers are going to suffer for the betterment of our team. Sacrificing for the team is a theme we talk about all the time. Fans may only look at the numbers, and that’s what they base their All-Star votes on. On our team, those individual numbers are going to be misleading, especially in Pau’s case.

He’s just a great guy, fluently bilingual. Our big Hispanic media in LA just love him. People might not know this, but he’s also one of the best athletes I’ve ever been around. He can dribble the ball, toss a football, do some tricks with a soccer ball, play ping-pong, all these different things that you would never imagine. And he’s a great guy on and off the court.

In Week 5, I talked about that Fox Sports Net show Sports Science. It was a lot of funning shooting the “hang time” episode. I learned that you can’t beat gravity. Also you find out why some guys stay in the air a split second longer than others, especially in basketball. They jump in the air, contort their body, they might get bumped which makes them go a little higher. They might go up, bring the ball down and around, let the ball go, all that as they’re about to hit the ground. All that makes it seem like they’ve been in the air longer but it’s only a split second more, if anything. The laws of gravity are the laws. When you go up, you go down in the same time as you go down. As they say in the episode, no matter who you are — Michael, Kobe, even Jordan Farmar, lol! — you’re not going to stay up there longer than one second. Essentially, there is no hang time, it’s an illusion. That’s why they call Sir Isaac Newton Sir Isaac Buzzkill. You can’t beat gravity! Although Kobe tried in that hilarious “Aston Martin” videoclip.

Fans often ask what we do on our days off. Days off are mostly when we’re at home. For me, rest is really important. I’m a homebody, so I like hanging out where I live in the South Bay area not far from Manhattan Beach. I wake up early, go out to the beach, get some breakfast, maybe at Uncle Bill’s Pancake House. Get a feel for the ocean, get the cooler air flowing towards you, breathe it all in. It’s refreshing. Most importantly, you want to rest and want to really conserve your energy. Maybe get a massage. See some friends I maybe haven’t seen in awhile. Mostly, just keep it low key.

Check out my new dish next week.

— JFarm