Rastaman Vibrations (Feature on Sacramento Kings guard Doug Christie)

“One good thing about music/ when it hits you, you feel no pain.”

-Bob Marley, “Trenchtown Rock,” 1971

If you happened to catch any of this year’s NBA Playoffs, a top-notch fashion show that occasionally deteriorated into a basketball game, you may have caught yourself paying rapt attention to Kobe Bryant’s jerseys. And I’m not talking about the purple-and-gold, either. Come on—you were riveted, as Kobe trotted out an endless array of throwback apparel in an admirable (and expensive) salute to his personal heroes. Jackie Robinson. Joe Montana. Hank Aaron. If you can’t admit it was fresh, you’re just jealous.

Though he may have been the most extravagant, Kobe wasn’t the only player saluting his heroes at this year’s Playoffs. If you’re a Sacramento Kings fan (and who the hell isn’t, save a handful of referees, apparently) you may have noticed Doug Christie, Sacto’s dynamic two-guard, in post-game interviews, rocking a simple black visor on his head with two words emblazoned on the front: “Bob Marley.” No Nike Swoosh, no hometown baseball team (granted, it’s Sacramento), no struggling dot-com. Just “Bob Marley.”

If, by chance, you recently stepped off a spaceship/submarine/time machine and that name means nothing to you, Robert Nesta Marley was reputedly born in Jamaica on February 6, 1945, and died in Miami on May 11, 1981. “Reputedly” is a necessary modifier, as there is no official record of Marley’s birth—in fact, like the island of Jamaica itself, so much of Marley’s life is steeped in tempestuous folklore that attempts to uncover anything resembling conventional “truths” can range from frustrating to utterly pointless. However, this much is truth: in the (roughly) thirty-six years he spent on this earth, Bob Marley established himself as: the most beloved and visible figure in the history of his country (and quite possibly the Caribbean as a whole); a major prophet of a sizable world religion (there are over 180,000 Rastafarians in the world today); the most active artistic voice against misery, tyranny and poverty on the African continent; and the first international superstar ever—ever—produced by the quote-unquote Third World. But most importantly Bob Marley made music. Primarily, essentially, and above all necessarily, Bob Marley made music, music that changed the world, arguably more than any musician before him and definitely more than any since. Ask Amnesty International, who use Marley’s anti-oppression classic “Get Up Stand Up” as their anthem, or any of the students at the Berhane Selassie School in Ethiopia, established by Marley and his wife for children left destitute by the Ethiopian Civil War. You can even ask those lovable progressivists in the CIA, so frightened by Marley’s influence in the Caribbean and Africa that they kept files on him for close to ten years. Chuck D is Laura Bush in comparison.

He also made music that changed lives, and thankfully still does. Doug Christie was on an airplane in 1994, during his days with the New York Knicks, when he first heard Bob. He was spacing out, writing a letter to his girl. It wasn’t the first time he had listened to him, but it was the first time he heard him, which is a distinction Doug is quick to make. “Everybody’s listening, but not everybody’s hearing him,” Christie says knowingly, and with the assured reverence of a priest who’s heard the Call, or a onetime cynic who’s found true love. “I was an occasional listener, and then all of a sudden I just heard him. I had been listening the whole time, but then one day I was like, wow.”

He pauses to let the gravity of the statement sink in, but anyone whose life has been touched by Bob Marley’s music needs no clarification. We can all remember the first time we heard Bob. For Doug Christie it was an airplane, for me it was a heartbroken teenage summer, for you it may have been at the club, on the beach, or just a balmy night on a city stoop. But it doesn’t really matter when it happened, it simply matters that it happened, and if it hasn’t yet happened to you, drop this magazine immediately and get yourself to a record store.

“I was going through a transition in my life,” Christie continues, “and Bob just came across with the love and family thing. He hit me with it—set me on a course to get married, and just changed my life in a lot of ways. First and foremost my family and my kids, my profession came second. That was the first thing that struck me with Bob, was the family thing.”

Treatises have been written conflating basketball and music, as every insecure sportswriter who strives to be down jumps at the chance to compare Iverson’s crossover dribble to Rakim’s flow, or MJ’s improvisational flair to a Coltrane sax solo. In the end it’s all pretty insufficient, because like any act of human beauty, both music and basketball are far more than the sum of their respective parts. However, it’s certainly not insufficient to suggest that music has informed basketball, simply by informing those who play it. The quiet-storm aggression of hip hop alligns itself rather nicely with a generation of ballers who grew up on BDP, Dr. Dre or Biggie Smalls, depending on where and when you’re from and exactly what your definition of “growing up” is. A gritty, whatever-it-takes competitor twice named to the NBA’s All-Defensive Team, Doug Christie’s approach to his work no more resembles the music of Bob Marley than does, say, this article you’re reading. But it’s certainly informed by it.

“I listen to Bob before games all the time,” Dough tells me emphatically. “Since I started listening to Bob, I don’t get as nervous as I used to do. I know I’m gonna do my best, and that whatever I do, I’m gonna try as hard as I can. It’s helped my basketball in the sense that I don’t worry about it as much. Bob teaches us how to get at what’s real about life. Helps me keep my priorities straight, you know? These are the things I want to do, but what are the things I need to do?”

There exists an unfortunate and despicably ignorant misconception that reggae music is “drug music,” and that Bob Marley was essentially a sublimely talented pothead who made music to get high to. This, of course, is ridiculous, and disrespectful both to Marley himself and the highly demanding and complex tenets of the Rastafarian faith. When I ask Doug about the susceptibility of a Marley-loving basketball star (already a stigma-laden profession in regards to marijuana use, thank you, Mr. Oakley) to unsavory suppositions, he bristles understandably.

“Stereotypes, sure, that’s fair to say. I’m sure that people stereotype me all the time. I never let that limit me, though, because I live for my family and no one else. I don’t judge anyone, and that’s another thing I’ve learned from Bob’s music, because he was judged all his life. No one has the right to judge another person unfairly. And if you think Bob was about weed, you don’t even know what the man was trying to say, so it only makes sense that you’d try to judge me. In the end I just don’t care.”

Bob Marley’s songs have a timeless and stunning universality—you can go anywhere in the world and bond with people over “Bob,” as the music eminates unity of the rarest, most magnificent form. Bob Marley sang songs of revolution, songs of love, songs of God and songs of freedom, often all in the same breath. Of all the beauties in Marley’s music, this unity is undoubtedly the most rewarding. “I look at Bob as a sort of sphere,” says Christie. “His music was so well-rounded. Some music you listen to just because the beat is real nice—he had melody, he had verbal skills, the heart and soul he put into the music, you can get lost in all of that, just because of the beauty. He covered the spectrum; there’s not a higher or lower with him. He was a genius. There’s certain people, certain things in life that cover it all. Bob did that in his music.”

Enough said. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go throw on my copy of Burnin’, even though after all these years it’s scratched to shit.

(Doug Christie’s favorite Bob Marley album is Exodus, followed closely by Talkin’ Blues).

Originally published in Dime, November 2002