I've been trying to figure out why it is that I've got zero to say about Delonte West. Maybe it's because I'm fairly confident that he'll lawyer up hard and be ready for the start of the season. Or because the Michael Beasley saga, in all its opacity and yanking around after answers, ended up covering so much broad "mental illness in sports" territory.
Then I realized: It's because I'm neither amused, shocked, nor saddened by it. West is bipolar; so am I. That doesn't make me unsympathetic to his situation—on the contrary, to me it's almost mundane, the kind of thing you wake up from and shake your head at. Not that I've ever ended up strapped to the teeth on a mini-bike, re-enacting a scene from a shitty movie. But since no one got hurt, and the explanation is obvious, the specifics are neither here nor there. This is what happens when you go off your meds. The legal system knows this, and presumably, Delonte is a little closer to figuring it out.
So if I'm failing to come up with anything penetrating, or start any meaningful discussion, it's because this is so close to home, it's a non-entity. I don't even feel like having a conversation about living with said disorder, because that's not even interesting to me. It's the hand some are dealt. It probably explains why West is such a tremendous personality, and also reduces this incident to a feature-less bump in the road.
Update: Baseline column on West/coverage of Beasley.
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