Everybody's got Blazer Fever in Portland these days, including the folks at Willamette Week. The Christmas Eve edition features a cover story on a present sent from New York, that everyone involved seems to agree will likely soon be returned sometime after the holidays. On merit and the long term needs and future of the franchise it makes sense, but based on the mutual love affair between 6'11" forward Channing Frye and his adoptive new city, it will be a damn shame if and when he packs his duffel for the last time and takes a paycheck somewhere else:
When the Portland Trail Blazers traded for Frye last year, it was a finishing nail in the coffin of the old “Jail Blazers” image. Gone were all the bad-character guys who had soured the small-town love between the franchise and the biggest city in America with just one major-league sports team.
And now, 18 months later, the Blazers are winning with a roster packed with good-character players. Yet Frye, just three years removed from being a promising, 6-foot-11 rookie standout, has hardly played this season.
None of which is particularly unusual in a league where players come and go faster than Allen Iverson can break your ankles with a crossover. But Frye, through his offbeat sense of humor and evangelistic love for his new home city, has quickly become a part of Portland’s fabric in a way very few pro athletes ever accomplish.
He is, for fans more concerned with local art and cuisine than with Brandon Roy dropping 52 on Phoenix last week, the face of the Blazers. He’s the guy they see regularly cracking jokes in the Portland press, eating with his bulldogs Milton (also known as “Fat Boy”) and Lily at the Tin Shed on Northeast Alberta Street, or hanging out in the Pearl on First Thursday.
And the love is mutual. “This is where I want to spend the rest of my life,” Frye says. “But, at the same time, if you ask me the question, ‘Do I think this is the place for me in the next five or six years?’ I’m saying definitely not.”
It's a great feature story, well detailed by Casey Jarman, but for me there's a touch of sadness to it. At no time do you get the sense that Frye feels sorry for himself, nor should we feel sorry for him (although while he made out like a bandit on his 4K sq ft SoWat condo in 2007, buying it for $1.8mil down from an original selling price over $3mil a year earlier, if he gets traded now he might be lucky to pull a million for it). But while the match on the court might not be ideal for either the team or Frye, it's clearly love at first sight between the player and the city itself:
Turns out, the 25-year-old Frye meshes perfectly with Portland’s sensibilities: He’s a music lover, from hip-hop and R&B to Coltrane (“when he goes off on a solo it’s like a guy getting hot on the court”) and even—if a touch ironically—Foreigner and Def Leppard (“I love that stuff, man…I love karaoke at Dante’s”).
Frye has turned his home into what amounts to a gallery for local artists like Alex Steckly and Klutch, who created a full-wall mural for the hallway between the master bedroom and living room.
He posts green tips on his blog at channingfrye.com and appears, bright smile alight, on recycling handouts from the city’s Office of Sustainable Development.
Like any true resident of Little Beirut, Frye rolls his eyes when President Bush comes on television. He is goofy, a student of pop culture (“VH1 is seriously competing for best channel ever”) and a bit of a nerd (his primary World of Warcraft character is “Dookiedrawls,” a level 76 gnome frost mage—though he maintains he’s not as serious about the game as Utah Jazz forward Andrei Kirilenko, who has a “really nice” level 80 paladin).
Perhaps most notably and permanently, Frye has also fallen in love with a very specific feature of Portland--one of its residents, Lauren Lisoski, who has become his fiancee' and will (natch) follow him to the next city and team that wants him. They met on Frye's first day in Portland, which actually kind of reminds me of me--I met my wife on my second day in Richmond, VA. And I plucked her out of the city she grew up in, as well.
As much as Channing and Portland deserve each other, in basketball terms his skillset just isn't really where the Blazers are thin right now. Travis Outlaw and Nic Batum are holding down his position for most of the game....and that's not even including Martell Webster, who will immediately take his starting spot back when he returns from injury. If he were 6'5"and could defend the perimeter like a champ he'd be enjoying a fat contract extension now. Alas, mid-size forwards who take long jumpers, we got.
So if you see Frye around town, give him a wave, ask how his World of Warcraft character is doing, challenge him to some darts at the Horse Brass, and wish him well wherever his career takes him. But tell him eventually we want him and his future wife back; around here in the cold and wet of winter, Portlanders always warm up to an old flame.
PS: for tonight's game against the Mavs, you can check out the preview at BEdge.
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