Remember how Obama was elected President, and race no longer mattered in America? Here's some proof of that: West Virginia, coached by Bob Huggins, stocked with your usual Huggins players, is the latest underdog to inspire us all by taking the piss out of some uppity bunch of future lottery picks. Take that, John Wall. You were shut down, and while those lazy pros who would never heed a coach's scheme won't do it, West Virginia did. That's a mark of shame you'll bear forever. You couldn't take it to the limit, you are mortal, and your whole career will be a sham. DeMarcus Cousins, big dude, you can't handle the triple-team. But they won't throw that at you in the pros because they don't have the heart. Or too much ego. Those two are opposites.
Okay, let me stabilize myself, this boat is awfully rocky on the high seas of knowing what I need and want. West Virginia. What state says America more than that one? They've had the shit shot out of them for striking (I've seen Matewan for the acting!) and otherwise just die in the mines. But they keep on. Just like those Mountaineers. They refused to quit. You know why? Because they didn't need the NBA. They knew they might be playing the last game of their college careers. And since they were Huggins guys, they weren't getting a degree, either. Some might say "oh, they are just a bunch of wannabe NBA players, how can they be so noble?" The answer? They saw the light. They might as well be white people, the way they put Kentucky in their place. No way Ebanks declares this year, he's got unfinished business—and real men take care of business.
Coach Cal, shut the fuck up. Huggins made his team work, and drew up the X's and O's to make you sweat. Fucking Italian. Go back to Africa with your fucking team. I have to say, I never liked the Bearcats, or whatever the mascot of K-State is. But Huggin is the real deal. Appalachia is the heartland, just higher in the air. God's country. You lead a horse to water, but in the end, you need a real cowboy with his hands on the pump. Who was that black dude at the Tea Party rally? He was post-racial America. Go Mountaineers.
A brief word about the last one: An earlier draft contained a reference to Martin's light skin, which I cited as another reason some people might be under the impression that he wasn't an aggressive player. But as Q McCall pointed out in a chat, in a context like AOL, it's hard to broach the concept of skin tone stereotypes without either:
1) Appearing to condone them 2) Having to exhaustively lay out the phenomenon 3) Giving a reader the opportunity to say "I don't think that way", thus weakening the argument 4) Meet with steep resistance to the very idea that such prejudice exists.
I finally decided that this point, and the meta-media question surrounding it, belonged here on FD—where, I think it's safe to assume, most of us have at least heard of this form of prejudice. But it was strange to realize how hard it was to write that sentence about Martin in a way that the general audience on FD would have found accessible, and would have had the desired effect.
Speaking of Martin and skin tone, I think we've seen something similar happen with Stephen Curry. Now that Curry's gotten comfortable, we're seeing what his game will look like at an NBA level, and it's pretty nasty. He penetrates, shakes defenders, crosses over at random, and doesn't fear disaster. In some ways, he's not that different than Monta. But since members of the media never watch the Warriors, they talk about him as a pure shooter with stellar basketball IQ and a airtight sense of right and wrong on the court. The Kevin Martin-syndrome, as much as anything else, explains the disconnect between the discourse surrounding Curry and the player you see on the floor.
Jay Caspian Kang thinks John Henson should wear a muu muu and a fat guy hat. Follow him at twitter.com/maxpower51
In the summer after graduating from college, as part of my introduction to New York City, I took the A train down to the fabled West 4th Street basketball courts. All melancholy literary types are required to vividly remember, and then write about, their first encounters with The City and so I, too, can recall the heat that day and how it curled the edges of the wheat-pasted posters, pushing those sight-bending currents of hot air out of the subway exits. When I got to the courts, a middle-aged man with a camera around his neck told me that the league games had been delayed on account of the heat. Two lines of massive men in jerseys leaned up against the chain-link fence, occasionally looking up at the cloudless sky for some form of absolution, occasionally looking out at the court where some teenage kids were playing three on three. Two of the kids—how could I have not noticed?—were Asian. The game was a fundamental mess, just six guys scrambling around until one could find a dunking lane. After about five or six failed tries, one of the Asian kids managed to throw one down, eliciting a half-hearted chorus of oohs and aahs from the assembled crowd.
After a decently choreographed strut, this kid turned towards the chain-link fence and screamed, “Fuck yeah, n***a! You see me just dunk on that n***a?” Then, turning to his fellow Asian, he puffed out his chest and said, “N***a, this shit is over.”
No one the fence seemed to think this was strange or even worthy of comment. I, as they say, shat my pants.
Later, while wandering around an empty street in Flushing, I overheard two kids talking to one another in Korean. When I turned around, I saw that the kids were Black. They must have read the disbelief on my face for what it was—an ignorant outsider who was about to take a mental photo for his cultural tourism scrapbook—because they gave me a dirty look and crossed the street.
How did I, who, prior to moving to New York, had lived in Boston, North Carolina, Maine, Los Angeles and Seattle, make it to the age of twenty-three without having ever met an Asian-American kid who had grown up much differently from me? It’s true that I spent my childhood in nice, college towns and that my exposure to other Asian-Americans was limited to bi-monthly potluck dinners where all the alumni of my father’s high school would sit around and discuss God knows what, but I cannot help but wonder if this vacancy of identity might be the inevitable product of an entire generation of kids who were pushed directly into the structures of American success. Almost all the Asian-American kids who grew up with me have lost the ability to speak the native language of our parents. Our conversations with our grandparents are conducted in shouted commands and hand gestures. When we watch Old Boy or In the Mood for Love, we alternate between an unfamiliar, displaced pride in a connection we cannot quite delineate and the shame of having to access it through subtitles. This distance, at least for me, came from a desire to duck out from the traditional immigrant shelter of family and culture, and although it felt like a conscious choice at the time, I sometimes look around at my Asian-American friends who suffer from the same blind spots, and wonder if we might have had any say at all.
The truth is, I really don’t know.
If we, indeed, tell ourselves stories to live, the children of immigrants find themselves with the odd task of having to make one up as they go along. The stories projected upon me by my parents were episodic and told in a language of destinations. On the first page, my sister and I sit with the other pilgrims at the tabard. On the next page, we arrive at the Archbishop of Harvard’s door. What happens between those two markers is what a friend of mine once referred to as, “our leg in the blind sprint towards whiteness.” For him and me and the Asian-American kids I grew up with, the verbs and the adjectives in our narratives are disposable, circumstantial. What matters is the tyranny of nouns. If we see another Asian kid in the classroom or in the workplace, we simply assume that they got there the same way we did. Why bother asking? We are the Son-at-Harvard or Nephew-at-Columbia or the Son-who-works-at-Goldman or the Daughter-who-just-got-into-Stanford Medical School. When the weight of our common hyphens forces us into naming some other connection, we summon the only metanarrative we know, collected from our own memories and the commonalities we assume—fathers who are computer programmers or dry cleaners, insane mothers who only shop at Costco, piano lessons, Asian Church, pickled immigrant foods and 1500s on the SATs. For the most part, the metanarrative is enough.
The only stories that might make us pause and reconsider the paradigm of endings are the ones that provide us with an alien set of destinations—the stand-up comedian, the police chief, the mass murderer, the potential first round pick in the NBA Draft. In other words, those stories that belong to other races.
The lineage of Jeremy Lin isn’t found in racial pie charts or in the history of unlikely minorities in big-time sports. Yao, Ichiro, Wat Misaka and Eugene Chung are not his context. Neither is Hines Ward. Instead, to understand Jeremy Lin, we must look to Jin, the diminutive Chinese emcee from Jackson Heights who, for seven weeks, dominated the Battle Stage on BET’s 106th and Park.
As is true with Jeremy Lin, it mattered that Jin was American born, it mattered that he was competing in front of a mostly Black crowd on BET and it mattered that he was doing it with lines like, “If you make one joke about rice or karate/NYPD be in Chinatown searching for your body.” When Wyclef ruined his career by trying to turn him into a dance-happy club bopper, it mattered that Jin told ‘Clef to fuck off and went straight back to battle raps. More than all that, though, it mattered that Jin was legit, succeeding in the closest thing the music industry has to a meritocracy. And although Ruff Ryders probably envisioned some DOA Eminem experiment when they signed him, it mattered that Jin was better than the pigeonhole. He wasn’t a short-lived anomaly or even some college radio act fueled by a disastrous vision of cultural tourism. He was a battle rapper and even after his run on 106 and Park and his album flop, he kept appearing on battle DVDs and he kept winning.
Yes, he probably inspired a few Asian kids to see a rap career as a real possibility, but Jin represented more than another against-all-odds Asian success story. He wasn’t Connie Chung or Gary Locke or Jerry Yang, who, regardless of their intentions, confirm the country’s racial math. Jin went Black. In doing so, for those of us who were heeled on the mantra of assimilation, who have grown weary of the race towards whiteness, who have lived our lives in the strange space of identifying with hip-hop’s stories of racial oppression, but who have never really felt that our own stories could live up to the comparison, Jin’s bravado and skill offered an alternative interpretation of what it meant to be an Asian-American.
Try to understand, most of us, at some point in the race, have wanted to turn around and start running the other way.
What, then, do you do with Jeremy Lin? Through no fault of his own, Lin stands at a bombed-out intersection of expected narratives, bodies, perceived genes, the Church, the vocabulary of destinations and YouTube. The Son-at-Harvard of a computer programmer from Palo Alto by way of Taiwan, Jeremy Lin is the metanarrative, and yet, without having done anything but dunk a basketball, his unwitting doppelganger waves a flag on the other side. If basketball doesn’t work out, Lin has said he would like to become a pastor, citing his family’s long-time devotion to the church. But in the spray-shot saloon of professional athletes and public assumptions, no place is more sinful than his first career choice: the NBA. Of course, it doesn’t even need to be said that none of these things, are, in fact, contradictory, but Lin’s story has already been taken over by writers, bloggers and fans who feel the need to distort, tweak and primp him up into a perfect metaphor.
In those hands, we are all absurd and riddled with contradiction. As perfectly as Jeremy Lin might fit inside our expectations for Asian-Americans, the reason for his sudden celebrity goes outside of the cultural matching game his fans play when they compare Jeremy Lin’s story to their own. There have been other Asian-American athletes who have excelled in other sports, only to elicit little to no response from the community. Across the Bay from Lin’s hometown of Palo Alto, Kurt Suzuki just turned in the best season of any position player on the Oakland A’s. A little way down the 101 in San Luis Obispo, Chris Gocong’s Philadelphia Eagles jersey hangs in the locker room at Cal Poly. Hines Ward was Super Bowl MVP and a possible Hall of Famer. So why does Jeremy Lin, shooting guard for the Harvard Crimson, repeatedly sell out gyms across the country?
It’s mostly about the dunks. The attention surrounding Lin has exploded this year, not because he’s playing any better than he did last year or because anyone cares about Harvard basketball, but because of the clips that have started circulating around youtube and sports websites that show Jeremy Lin dunking all over Georgetown, Boston College and UConn. Without this footage, which is studied with an almost anthropological zeal on some Asian-American sports blogs (yes, they exist), Jeremy Lin would be nothing more than a nice human-angle story, another kid from unexpected origins who was making the best of his God-given ability.
In one of his most watched YouTube clips, Lin sprints back on defense and swats a dunk attempt by UConn’s Jerome Dyson. In the clip’s caption, Dyson is described as “Jerome Dyson, projected 2nd round pick in the 2010 draft.” For the author of the caption, the equation is clear: Jeremy Lin not only can play, but he has the hops to youtube a guy who will one day be playing in the league, and not some white kid from Dartmouth, but a bona-fide African-American athlete.
Therefore, by the transitive property, Jeremy Lin can also play in the league.
With its giants in skimpy uniforms, basketball allows us to see, clearly and plainly, the differences between us, the fans, and the athletes on the floor. Our perception of those bodies is driven by antiquated, but overwhelmingly accepted ideas of race. Dwight Howard is described as the winner of a “genetic lottery.” Lebron is either “otherworldly” or “superhuman,” whereas Steve Nash’s success comes from his ability to “overcome his athletic limitations.” When confronted with the task of placing their man on either side of the divide, Jeremy Lin’s fans, who have spread their research out across message boards and sports blogs, point out his breakaway speed, his vertical leap, his deceptive height. What they do not discuss is his jump shot, his free-throw percentage or his ability to throw a crisp bounce pass. Somewhere in the endless comparisons, odd personal anecdotes about meeting the man, and obsessive odes to Lin’s musculature, these fans have placed an implicit caveat onto his story: if he makes it to the league and plays a White game, this will all be for nothing.
Unfair, yes. But those of us trapped within the metanarrative have been conditioned our entire lives to imagine White. Like Jin before him, what Jeremy Lin represents is a re-conception of our bodies, a visible measure of how the emasculated Asian-American body might measure up to the mythic legion of Big Black supermen.
Within that singularly American calculus, it’s not about basketball at all. It’s about our fucked up anthropology.
You know Twitter has #FF, when no one says anything, or responds to anything, and the whole thing turns into an open-air bazaar for absolutely nothing? In honor of that, I'm doing a quick post here that's similarly pointless.
First, up top, an absolutely amazing drawing of Artis Gilmore from an old SI that, were this several years ago, we would be trying to put on a t-shirt. Now, I think the most we can do is put it up here and wave our arms some. Unless The Vault, which rules, wants to partner with us to do a series of old illo tees curated by us. Just a thought.
Last basketball: Very soon, I'm dropping a really long Gilbert Arenas piece over at The Baseline that I swear you will all love. Stay tuned.
Maybe you noticed that the store ads disappeared (for now) and ye olde Amazon widget moved up. I've decided to get back in the swing of that, partly for the added revenue stream, but in large part because I like writing blurbs about non-sports stuff. Up there now: Cooperstown Confidential, a Bloomsbury book that's less about scandal-mongering and more turning it's grotesquely, indiscriminantly mythic—and totally supra-American—past into something more believable. I think it saves history, while creating a bridge between those days and the imperfect present. I hope we manage that in the new book. Steven Johnson's The Ghost Map had me talking about cholera and shit to anyone who would listen in the week before my wedding, but is really worth it for the finale, where he smushes together the last sentence of every magazine feature he's ever written about civilization, evolution, terrorism, health, and the value of cities.
The Damned Don't Cry is one of those rare movies where Joan Crawford is both scary and hot, as well as a genre pic with layers, or maybe two genres at once. This coming from someone who watches at least one forgettable noir joint a week. I still don't get why there's a song on Africa Brass with the same name, and would prefer to not look it up. The Big O is well past my cut-off year for basketball memoirs, but Robertson's an intensely private man who decided to open up here, and as with his game and personality, you can feel the anger simmering just beneath the stately (okay, sometimes staid) prose. They Cleared the Lane is not only the single best book about race in the early NBA, but also, in its eye for detail, gives you some invaluable info and understanding of that era in general. Breaks my heart that this isn't more widely-read.
Finally, Heaven and Earth's I Can't Seem to Forget About You. Buying this import new is expensive, but there are cheaper used copies up there. The kind of sweet soul so haunting, and uneasy, it borders on scary. Oddly, "Let Me Back In" might be the song I most associate with my wedding weekend.
Next week, I will return to FreeDarko, and hopefully The Baseline will load reliably. In the meantime, you should check out this 2003 Roger Beebe video, which I just saw at an INCITE! screening on the subject of sports and aesthetics.
Hello all, and welcome to another FD Guest Lecture. This one comes to you courtesy of Brendan K. O'Grady, author of 2nd Round Reach.
When you start to win as many championships as the Los Angeles Lakers have, it’s not good enough to just talk about how nice it is to win. So, starting sometime in May, the narrative of LA’s playoffs became an extreme program of self-reflective mythmaking in the name of one Kobe Bryant, administered to us for the better part of two months by Nike, Gatorade, and the World Wide Leader in Sports.
But now, weeks removed from the din of pomp and ceremony, let us take a moment to consider the championship as it presents an equally significant legacy statement for not merely one man, nor his teammates, nor even the storied franchise for whom they won it, but rather for an aggregation of oft-impugned ballers who have now been gifted with their ultimate rebuttal: The Euro.
For the better part of two decades, the term “Euro” immediately evoked something resembling one of two primary archetypes: Either men with floppy hair and too-slight builds for their height, or men with high-cheek beards and good passing skills from the post. The pioneering Euros- men like Sabonis, Petrovic, Divac, Smits, and Kukoc- had influential careers, in some cases earning the respect of league-wide accolades and even winning a little. But the modest successes they presented immediately lead to over-eagerness from NBA teams for still greater returns. These mysterious figures from distant lands represented possibilities unknown but unconstrained, a Myth Of The Next bonanza promising to make “once-in-a-generation” talents a “two-or-three-times-in-a-draft” reality.
When Pau Gasol entered the league in 2001, he was the perfect player at the perfect time to further feed the league’s enthusiasm for Euros. A super-skilled ROY in waiting, his intercontinental qualities were never as apparent as those seasons he spent at work on the blocks, maneuvering his still-skinny frame around defenses and stuffing stats across the box score. He was hailed as a cornerstone, savior of a team that could never attract talent that wasn’t shipped in from overseas and didn’t know any better that Memphis was among everybody’s least favorite cities on an NBA road trip. Before too long, Pau grew his beard and his grit, and soon he lead the lowly Grizzlies to their first playoffs, all the while colored with nouns like “finesse” and “gracefulness.”
But Gasol would prove to be more the exception than the rule. Sometime around the mid 2000s, after committing untold millions to prospects not long for NBA rosters, the word “Euro” started to become a stigma, synonymous with “longshot” when spoken of a teenagers born internationally, and a near-pejorative when describing domestic products who possess a solid stroke and no defensive ability.
By the mid-2000s, speculation on Euro futures had come to a head, but the continent had yielded fewer successes than the time, money and draft picks invested might have otherwise dictated. The reputation of the Euro as an under-performer might well have been cemented then, as the first Euro Decade had almost entirely proven itself a litany of outright failure.
The most obvious point of redress here is the obvious question of the Dynasty Spurs, from whom a vocal minority of NBA fans will claim as many as three era-defining Euros with as many championships between them. But a cursory glance reveals that the effect of their supposedly heightened Euro presence has been greatly exaggerated.
First of all, quick guards might be the most borderline of all Euro postionalities- a higher-percentage version of the American “combo guard” counterparts. Scorer/distributors of this mold are rarely tagged as “soft”, even if they come with funny accents. But much more importantly, neither Parker nor Ginobili were ever anything less than wholly sublimated to the collective cause of winning in a system driven by the supreme force of the Popavich/Duncan spirit tandem. And while Timmy was neither born nor raised a continental, by now he’s surely been recognized as definitively less an “international” player than, say, a Kobe Bryant (or hell, even a Carlos Boozer.) Oh, and Ime Udoka is from Oregon. Seriously. Look that shit up.
With so many mitigators at play, San Antonio remains, at best, a heavily-qualified case for the Euro’s redemption.
Then there were those magical Suns teams of recent memory, which flirted revolution on many fronts, most of which were imported from other countries. Mike D’Antoni was a star as a player in Italy, and critics initially dismissed the run n’ gun offense as a charming curio, carried over from less competitive leagues across the pond. The Steve Nash/Leandro Barbosa tandem possessed such seemingly preternatural packages of ability, vision, speediness and control that a logical path of least resistance immediately (and stupidly) attributed them to exotic heritage, and the therefore-inescapable influence of soccer on their play. And then there was the positional enigma-cum-puzzle-box that is Boris Diaw. At their philosophical foundations, those teams were as radically “European” a phenomenon as anything since the Frankfurt School.
But the fact of all the “7 seconds or less” rhapsodizing now really just betrays that smug condescension toward those squads that we knew was always there. The mainstream of basketball tradition can afford look back fondly on memories of the entertaining desert upstarts because, well, conventional wisdom was right all along, wasn’t it?
“That stuff may be fun, but it doesn’t win championships.”
Inevitably, expectations lowered. Franchises would still scout Europe, but rarely for anything more than a quality rotation player. And just when it started to look like the Euro would never cast off the stereotypes thrust upon them by years of ridicule and flopping, what might have been the penultimate blow to their collective reputation was dealt...
As the best player of the 2006-2007 season, Dirk Nowitzki was poised to become the greatest Euro in history. His Mavericks were a confluence of players with complementary and very American styles (as presented by Stackhouse, Jason Terry, and especially Josh Howard) yet all were molded around Dirk’s singular, distinctly foreign presence. He brought an alien skill set, and altered the course of the NBA’s season with the effect that only a 7-foot white shooting guard masquerading as a power forward could have on the game.
Their collapse against Miami the previous year was brutal, to be sure, but the edges were softened a bit by the world’s realization of Wade’s ascendance and the knowledge that they would endure and come back nothing but hungrier. The loss may well have fueled Dallas as they navigated an absurdly competitive field to achieve a league-best regular season campaign, and the catalyst for a return trip to the Finals (stop me if this sounds familiar.)
And for prolonged stretches in that year, Dirk’s Euroness was synonymous with the strength of granite mountains, and no longer spoken of with the superficial novelty that once would have come in the same breath as the words “Nikoloz Tskitishvili.” After the first such sustained period of brilliance from the caste’s greatest hero, no more demoralizing a moment could have existed for the Euro than when a shattered Dirk, all sunken-eyes and vacant smile, shook hands and posed with Stern as he accepted his MVP trophy, just a week after being eliminated from contention during the anarchic Warriors’ impossible paroxysm against reality.
By the start of the next season, Pau Gasol had repeatedly vocalized his annoyance with a franchise that refused to grow with him into an entity worthy of much more than a first round bounce come the postseason. When Chris Wallace caved and sent Pau to the coast, an already better-than-expected Lakers team started looking scary good. And the praise for Pau’s play lasted all the way until the Finals, when he ran smack up against a green wall of shouting, grunting, pushing, elbowing ferocity that quickly put him on his heels.
After being decimated by Boston, Gasol was among the readiest scapegoats on the roster (along with fellow Euros Ronny Turiaf and Sasha Vujacic) and it immediately became common knowledge that the 7 foot Spaniard’s “softness” is what made him anathema to proper, homegrown big men. Even as the Lakers rolled through the west this season, it felt at times that praise for Gasol, while consistent, was somewhat muted as if nobody wanted to be the first to declare Pau a legitimate stud playing for what many portended the soon-to-be champion Lakers.
Then, as the playoffs unfolded, the moral of Dirk’s story was periodically invoked to invalidate Gasol’s role with the eventual champs. Failing to stand up to the interior toughness of Houston/Denver/Orlando (just as his was supposedly the failing versus the Celtics), Pau would have earned a place right beside Dirk in the lamentable lineage of the Euro. And even in winning, his role beside an All-Universe shooting guard who already had three rings of his own would prove their collective curse. Just as Dirk collapsed under the weight of the expectations placed upon him, Gasol would serve as further proof that a Euro could never lead a team to victory himself.
But really, there’s no shame in being the unquestioned second best player on your team when playing beside one of only a handful of men with legitimate claim to the GOAT. And winning a title as a minor role player is something wholly different than what Gasol accomplished going toe-to-toe with Howard. Pau made good on the nearly-abandoned concept of the Euro as an inside presence par excellence, a true Power Forward tested in battle against a DPOY man-child/beast.
Even if Dwight’s nature as a big is of an indeterminate nature in the greater FD ethos, there’s no denying that he’s cast of the immense physicality dreamed of by GMs in a traditionally (read: American) dominant big, nor is there that Pau roundly outplayed him in 5 games. Much more than a learned forward with a fluid game and soft touch, Gasol was reborn in the Finals as a bona-fide force. He out-banged everybody for just about any rebound that mattered, carried LA through long stretches of the games that were close enough to contest, and ran up the score to ensure that the others weren’t.
Still, now and forever, some will say Dirk’s failure should invalidate Gasol’s success and his redemption of the Euro’s name. And the fact is, no- he didn’t do it as the #1 guy. But the naysayers are on the wrong side of a canonical divide. A Finals legacy is benevolence unknown to all but the select few who achieve what Gasol did and Dirk didn’t. History really is written by the victors, and winning softens even the harshest criticism with the patina of time.
The Lore of championships elevated a career second banana to a place in the 50 Greatest list’s golden glow, and begat the yang-adage of popular wisdom that, no, Michael never won without Scottie either. Pau’s playoffs will stand in a similar light, enduring the trials of retrospect, pride in the knowing that although he might never have been first on his team, his was the first Euro title.
This morning, my distinguished colleague twitted the following about everyone's favorite char-broiled NBA lightning rod, and sub-rosa racial interloper:
lingering thought-did kobe really say "i'm an 80s baby" when asked about the artest foul? what type of bs cred is he trying to buy? (and, my standard qualification: i still LOVE kobe...it's just...what a nerd)
Now, without taking anything away from Dr. LIC's intuition—yes, this sounded contrived, and almost made you think that Kobe had planned out a semi-youthful, semi-traditionalist way of framing the situation in advance. But whatever persistent reason you may have settled on for mocking Bryant (his fake-ness, his cultural uncomfortable-ness, his personality, his self-consciousness), we're all assuming that Kobe doesn't understand where Jay-Z stands these days. It's entirely conceivable that Bryant knows that, these days, Jay is pop culture detritus, not the lingua franca of street cred. The remark was fun, flippant, and knowing, an admittedly nerdy way of evoking Jay-Z as both foundational and cliched. Being goofy with hip-hop is dangerous territory, especially for Bryant, but does the alternative—that he cluelessly tried to channel the streetz and fell flat—is to give the guy way too little credit. The only thing worse than caricaturing players is caricaturing ourselves as fans.
This feeds into what might be the most compelling mano y mano rivalry of the playoffs. No, it's not Kobe/Bron; that 1 point/minute average for James has him in a stratosphere all his own for now, especially given how easy it's looked for him. It's this Kobe/Ron Ron binary that's emerged not so much on the court (all elbows aside), but in the imagination of the public. If Bryant's slammed for tip-toeing around hip-hop, Artest is lionized as a man who walks with a cloud of Mobb Deep samples over his head whether or not he ever explicitly makes the connection. If he did an entire post-game interview with Kool G Rap quotes, bloggers would faint from glee. Never mind for a second that if you want to get aesthetic about it, Artest's hip-hop analogue is M.O.P., while Kobe can tap into a far more substantial lineage of self-serious, style-laden masters. Or that Artest is going out of his way to repaint himself as a tough player, not a hood one, going so far as to suggest that there's no essential connection between the two.
And then you have Artest faintly conspired against by the league, and Kobe riding a wave of whispers about a rigged Lakers/Cavs Finals. Not to say this has turned into a study in racial or cultural contrasts—or that it should be either—but once again, Kobe's being cast in, pardon my pun, a black/white situation. Maybe Kobe isn't as "real" as Artest, but is Artest a player driven solely by what he learned from Kool G Rap fantasies? Isn't Artest way more Bad Boys than Kobe? If all this boils down to is "Artest saw friends die on the basketball court and Kobe grew up rich," then we might as well ignore everything they've accomplished, and asserted, as professional athletes—and admittedly convoluted adults.
Do that, then you can start arguing about who belongs to hip-hop, or who hip-hop belongs to, in the NBA.
We all have those key moments, images or sentences that, however accidentally, anchor the way we view basketball. I don't think the same is true for bigger issues like life and love—or at least it shouldn't be for those over the age of 20—but if you're reading this site, chances are your understanding of hoops may have a little bit of whimsy to it. I've never particularly cared about sports as an elemental force that overwhelms all agency and takes you to a special place; I prefer some distance and creative agency on the part of the audience, which depending on how you see it, is either "liberating" or totally contrived.
One of those touchstones for me has always been that time, during the 2007 playoffs I think, when Kobe sat in with the TNT crew. No, not because I have any interest in playing he said/she said about Bryant this morning, but for one brief exchange, yet to materialize on YouTube, about the difficulty of playing against Manu and Barbosa. I don't have an exact quote, but the general idea was that the rhythm of their games were different than those of Americans; not only did this make guarding them a challenge, it also represented a breath of fresh of air that you could still the (FAKE ASS NEVER EVEN BEEN TO ITALY!!!!!) Mamba got off on. Doubtlessly, Kobe's conclusions here have something to do with his love of soccer, his hyper-analytical understanding of the game, and a cosmopolitan bent. But the basic idea: That international players bring a different perspective to the game, both on and off the court, and that while the Euro craze may have subsided, its ripples may be felt in these more subtle ways for some time.
It's not a radical notion to introduce race, culture, ethnicity into descriptions of a player or his style. How many times have we heard it debated how "black" somene's game was, or to what degree a player's "whiteness" might influence fan sentiment? But desite the Right Way's attempt to co-opt all pale prospects to their cause—they can bounce-pass, they don't wear chains, ergo they must be the second coming of Larry Bird—they all came from distinct backgrounds, where attitudes and mores surrounding the sport were unfamiliar, even strange, on these shores. Some of this has been subtle; these players have been prone to stiff-lipped professionalism, while at the same time have also had their share of exposure to the "black" game that the NBA exported while shunning it on American shores. Yet even if the European players could be uncomfortably squeeezed into pre-existing black/white categories, there was just no way to do that once Latin America, Yao, and Africa became major forces in the NBA. To return to Kobe's quote, when I watch Barbosa, Manu, the Spaniards, or the newly-spry and funky Nene, I realize just how damn diverse the Association has become without even realizing it. And how pointless it is to resist this fact.
Ironically, I'm bringing all this up in reference to Dirk, who has does a damn good job of letting fans and media forget that he's from another country. Dirk is the good son, the impeccable mechanic, the technician who refuses to let his emotions unravel him at any given time. Cool, maybe too cool; his game, at times not rough enough. But it's no coincidence that, so far, the greatest international player to touch down on these shores for his whole career is also one who readily fit into the NBA's need for a Great White Hope (to counter Iverson), or after that, could still be talked about in terms of "white" ball even as accusations crept in of non-descript Euro "softness." Put simply, Dirk's been cast as a really, really good white dude who is just a little weird.
That's why the mini-scandal surrounding Nowitzki's "these three can check me" comments, predicated almost exclusively on an element of shock and disjuncture, should have sparked neither. So Webber, Kenny, and Barkley can't imagine an elite scorer admitting in public that opponents can slow him. Dirk, after making remarks that the TNT crew saw as evidence of a fatal flaw, proceeded to be positively untroubled by almost anything the Nuggets threw at him. Even if he wasn't quite so eager to take it inside, it's worth noting that Dirk's one of the few players out there who can be bad-assed with the jumper, and not of the J.R. Smith, miles-from-the-line three variety. He makes efficiency both deadly and something to be feared. If that doesn't sound like a German stereotype, then my readership is even younger than I thought. I find it striking that the attitudes Webber et al. were up in arms over may have been informed by "black" values honed on the playground, bravura and swagger and all that. But they don't seem that limited. In fact, they strike me as fairly, across the board, American in nature, whether you're talking NCAA slop or Kobe vs. Artest.
Does it come as any surprise, then, that Nowitzki lies beyond the pale on this one? I don't want this to degenerate into duelling stereotypes; nor do I know enough about German culture to make any observations about Dirk that really lead anywhere. Suffice it to say that these utterances, followed by the monster game, framed by the bemused honesty that's become so much a part of Nowitzki's public persona . . . is it such a stretch to admit that there are indeed foreigners among us? They may not shape the game, or reinforce its discourses. But to really understand Dirk (or Yao), we have to understand that often, we won't understand. Not as black people, white people, white people who think they understand black people, or black people who think they understand white people. Or any of the above holding forth on a non-descript non-American, un-American, "softness", a quality which certainly doesn't translate across cultures, and yet is the only attempt made to understand international players as not just black or white.
There's likely a middle ground between the TNT crew's tunnel vision and Kobe's multi-cultural bonanza. More importantly, though, if sports cliches are already tired, or polarizing, these individual international stars should at least temporarily explode them beyond recognition. So we can all be free.
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-Funny that we think of the Mavs as kind of boring, when they are disconcerting honesty central. I speak primarily of Dirk (above), and, of course, Josh Howard. Reader Johnny Lauderdale points out that, with regard to Howard, there's almost a collective denial surrounding him, like he's been blackballed:
I watch a lot of Mavs games with the local broadcast guys, and putting them side by side with guys on ESPN/TNT... it is just flat out bizarre how noticeable the difference in tone regarding Josh Howard is. They seem hesitant to even mention his name (outside of the "well maybe the Mavs would be better without him... you know, since he is hurt" discussion, which regardless of its validity... that just isn't the way professional athletes are usually talked about during a broadcast) on ESPN (outside of JVG who always mentions Josh crashing offensive glass against his Houston teams), but on local Fox Sports it is just like old times (look to Josh for early offense blah blah blah). Things only get stranger when you put it in context with how people talked about him at the beginning of 07-08, when it was hip to suggest that the Mavs were actually "his team", in part because of a perceived preference Avery held for him over Dirk.
I'd like to add that Howard tries to play hurt and no one breaks out a single trumpet? In the playoffs? If that's not amazing, I don't know what is. Even the Spurs get more dramatized love than that.
-New Shoals Unlimited coming soon, on the subject of the MVP and writing history.
-Widget has been updated with new picks.
-Film thing that might interest no one: Last night after the game, I watched A Woman's Face, which was totally awesome. As is the case with most old movies, though, it had a tacked-on happy ending that undermined, maybe even contradicted, the stronger ideas of the entire other 1.5 hours. Am I supposed to ignore these? Believe that once, everyone believed in redemption and dreams coming true? Seek the middle ground?
Today's Guest Lecturer is Brian Phillips, the mind behind The Run of Play. Soccer enthusiasts no doubt already hail Brian and his work; if you don't know the first thing about the sport, be advised that RoP is the closest FD gets to a sister site. Or blood brothers across time and space. Earlier: The PED/NBA debate, and a chance to buy a few of my records.
Here's the contrast that's keeping me up at night: European soccer and the NBA both have racism problems, but they manifest themselves in almost exactly opposite ways. Obviously Europe and America are different societies, variables diverge, math unrolls like a carpet, and nothing can be said about the subject that looks strict in the light of science. But it's a problem I can't stop speculating about, particularly given that so much else about the two sports—Kobe is friends with Avram Grant!—seems to be sloshing in the belly of the same whale.
In the NBA, racism is a substrate, a sentence that only makes sense if you know the words' etymologies. It's something you can talk about, not something you have to talk about, which is why it's so insidious. It's part of the interpretive structure, a deniable anxiety in the atmosphere (Is it a little cold? No. Shiver.), a form of judgment whose assumptions are disconnected from the thought process of the people who pursue it. That is, the suavities of Donald Sterling aside, it's largely covert and unconscious; it stays vague, informing descriptive categories (the "intelligent" player vs. the "athletic" player) and the periodic outrage that inevitably breaks out in a league in which black players are tacitly perceived as dangerous to white fans. It's a fundamental component of the culture of the game, but it doesn't overwhelmingly or frequently run afoul of the swirling taboos that regulate the same forces in society.
Contrast that to soccer in Europe, where it's still not uncommon for fans to throw bananas on the pitch and coordinate monkey chants to taunt black players. This isn't a narrative of progress, in which the NBA has absorbed and begun to resolve conflicts still wild and at large in soccer, because, at least at the level of categorical interpretation, soccer almost certainly has less endemic racism than basketball. It's just that the expressions of racism (and its worldly twin, ethnic hatred) that do occur tend to be obliteratingly direct. Ajax fans in Holland have appropriated Jewish iconography in recognition of the fact that their stadium used to be located near a Jewish neighborhood in Amsterdam. Their opponents' fans hiss in unison to simulate the sound of the gas coming down at Auschwitz.
Which actually opens onto one of the likely reasons for the dichotomy. The agony that's soaked into the rock in soccer isn't race, as it is in the NBA, it's nationalism. In the NBA—let's widen that into American sports in general—the defining figures and moments are generally encoded in the history of race: you have Louis vs. Schmeling, the Jackie Robinson breakthrough, the Globetrotters, Ali and Bill Russell as divergent possibilities for the civil rights movement, Magic and Bird as the salvific dyad of the 80s, Iverson and the mainstream threat of hip-hop paired with the Spurs and the emergent disciplinarian cult of the bounce pass. In soccer, by contrast, you have a litany of nationalist conflict: Mussolini co-opting the 1934 World Cup, FC Barcelona as the posed flagbearing orphan girl of the Catalan resistance to Franco, the '64 European Nations' Cup final between the USSR and Spain as the late last battle between communism and fascism, Rangers and Celtic restaging the Irish Troubles in Glasgow every season, Ajax fans singing about the bombing of Rotterdam, Zidane and the '98 French World Cup team as the expiation of postcolonial resentment.
Unlike American racism, which can be seen as an internal social problem transformed by changing attitudes within one overarching culture, the history of European nationalism was decided by relatively recent battles between armies whose sources of legitimacy were external to one another. Thus, to forestall the unanswerable shame that attaches itself to overt expressions of prejudice in American sports (Rush Limbaugh on Donovan McNabb, even Shaq when Yao first came into the league), prejudice in soccer can fall back on the dim memory of concrete populist ideologies. That's not to say that the shirtless gentleman holding the corner of the "Filthy Gypsy" banner is a learned proponent of any identifiable right-wing philosophy, but there's at least a vaporous sense that attitudes like his loathing for Ibrahimović were not long ago articulated by governments and embraced by respectable people. Which is enough to give them a perverse air of community justification, even when all the institutional forces in the sport are consciously trying (again, much more emphatically than the NBA) to eradicate racism and sectarianism from the game.
Obviously, there are other, simpler factors at work as well—the lack of diversity in certain parts of Europe, the natural territorial rivalry of political entities in condensed space. But I think this internal/external dynamic is important, partly because it points to a psychological possibility for the future of the NBA. Up till now the Stern-powered drive to globalize the league has been felt by American fans as essentially a phenomenon of intake: the best players coming from other parts of the world to play in our league. We know from recent Olympics that the game is being played at a high level in a lot of other countries, and we know from T-Mac at the airport (and I wasn't paying attention, but I'm guessing nine million trend reports in the New York Times Magazine) that it's "getting big in China." And we can see that foreign players like Ginobili have influenced American players to some degree. But so far that feels more like a side story than like a power that will transform our own perception of the sport.
What if it does, though? In European soccer the talent-import channel is wide open: the best leagues in the world are all European, and there's deep business in buying up the youth of Africa and South America and caravaning them to the big clubs' academies. In the last couple of years Arsenal has actually fielded teams with no English players. But the global popularity of soccer has combined with modern media overload to create its own anxieties.
The English Premier League now has several times as many fans outside England as it does inside it. A league that belongs to one country but is ardently followed by dozens of others ceases, in a sense, to belong to anyone. Local meanings wash out of the game, which in some ways impairs its social function, and jealousies mount up on the periphery. It's possible to try to ignore that, but doing so has practical consequences in a world where elite leagues exist in multiple countries: Real Madrid's recent attempt to lure Manchester United's star winger Cristiano Ronaldo to Spain almost certainly took courage from the fact that the Portuguese player had been blithely caricatured as a villain by xenophobic English tabloids. So how do fans react when they realize that someone is always watching them? The forms of hostility in soccer have grim historic precedents, but they can also be seen as the overwhelmed fan's furious attempt to blot out the rest of the world.
If the NBA really does become a global league—and there are people in soccer who think it can't be stopped—then what becomes of our relationship to the sport when American history is no longer the orb at the center of the game?
For serious, I swore I was going to take it easy over All-Star Weekend. Instead, some links:
-Joey and I frantically work through the implications of a shorn AI. -Ty and Carter pay snide attention to the non-dunk parts of All-Star Saturday. -Over at TSB, my Then and Now column overviews the weekend. No, "overview" is not a verb, except for here. Read and comment on this one so it stays alive.
Oh, and after much deliberation, we've decided to gently call out TNT for their Sunday intro. No, not because of its forgettably racist overtones, but because it's invocation of "spirit animals" and "style" was just a little too close to home. Probably not as glaring as the the ESPN mag deal, but still, we're left feeling something between flattered and slighted. Plus, they really should've dug a little deeper into the desert ecosystem.
Now, onto brighter places, or at least those that thrive and scamper in the fields of discourse, not envy. Michael Lewis's Battier/NBA Moneyball/how Morey works piece has seriously shaken up the basketball world. At least the kind that reads the Times. Some have been blindsided (ha!) by this sudden and gaping window into Morey's methods. But what's really made an impact is the fact that Battier, formerly thought of as that annoying Duke whose fantasy numbers means you have to draft him, but will automatically forfeit your team's claim to likeability, is portrayed here as a truly advanced stylist and a compelling figure. It was, in many ways, an FD-ization of Battier, albeit as a means toward an end.
Central to this version of Battier is the idea that he's not simply a scrappy guy who likes to defend and do "the little things," a hungry opportunist who imposes himself on the game by taking over the real estate no one else wants. Instead, Battier remains constant as "a weird combination of obvious weaknesses and nearly invisible strengths." What's more, compared to the hustle guy who hits the floor on every play, Battier pursues a far less brute version of the glue guy—who even in Morey's parlance, can be seen as seeking some form of attention as an assertion of style. It's not just that his contributions only really come through in advanced stats; compared to Battier, a lot of other intangibles experts come across as single-minded and, in their lack of ego, almost showy. Battier is on another level, versatile and evasive. He's nothing less than the Right Way version of apositional icons like Lamar Odom and Shawn Marion—a player who, while dependent on context (whether instantaneous or long-term, as in a system) for direction, is valuable precisely because of his ectoplasmic net effect. And in Battier's case, this requires more flexible math than the box score offers, as if Shane himself provided the impetus for a change.
It's no accident that Lewis sees fit to include a healthy dose of Battier's biography, devoted in large part to his identity in the game as a mixed-race youth. Presumably without irony, Lewis explains that Battier followed the ultra-black Chris Webber at Detroit Country Day, but realized he could never be that player. Of course, Webber himself had plenty of identity issues, but on the court, there was no question he was a super-charged, highly-skilled power forward who had "superstar" scrawled all over his corpus. Anyway, the Life of Battier:
And yet here he was shuttling between a black world that treated him as white and a white world that treated him as black. ''Everything I've done since then is because of what I went through with this," he said. "What I did is alienate myself from everybody. I'd eat lunch by myself. I'd study by myself. And I sort of lost myself in the game."Losing himself in the game meant fitting into the game, and fitting into the game meant meshing so well that he became hard to see. In high school he was almost always the best player on the court, but even then he didn't embrace the starring role.
To me, this perfectly sums up why Battier is both so frustratingly hard to pin down, and in some ways, so fittingly the role player of the future. The pure specialist is as much of a dinosaur as the 20ppg scorer who offers little else. Not to conflate race and style too much, but think about Battier: Sure, he appeals to conservative fans and lacks swagger, but he's also long, versatile, and has been known to make pinpoint, aggressive plays. You follow from there. "Meshing so well that he became hard to see" is a statement about style, but it's also a reflection on identity. Battier's neither a black guy playing white, or someone whose white game is arrived at through means often associated with a certain stran of black player (the difference between Battier and Outlaw is. . . ). Granted, most of this is pat, but if Battier is next level when it comes to this "flow of the game" stuff, it might not be by coincidence that he also confounds easy race-based stereotypes on the court. He doesn't transcend oppositions; instead, he hangs out in everyone's margins, impossible to explain and thus posing a riddle to both sides. That shared terrain, that intersection of margins, is vast and unexplored, and it's only natural it would give rise to new kinds of players and a new way of seeing the game.
And yeah, there is an Obama reference earlier on in the story.
As Ziller explains, first the news came over email. As Tom succinctly put it, "no haircut could ever be more meaningful. In all of America." If I believed in titles that made sense, I'd go with "The Chop Heard 'Round the World." Nate Jones later posted photographic evidence, seen above. But before we knew exactly what was up, in those first few breathless moments of comprehension, Joey Litman and I tried to make sense of it all.
Bethlehem Shoals: Inside report: AI HAS CUT OFF HIS BRAIDS Joey Litman: I hope he goes back to the mini-fro he had at Georgetown. There was something youthfully innocent about it, and I think it engendered optimism in me. I am also a nostalgist, though. BS: I like that angle. Like before him being him was a burden. JL: Exactly. Back when he was free to just play. To just be. To be a kid. His public persona, for better or worse, is kind of like a prison. BS: There was always something defensive about the braids. Like "yeah, this is me where I feel safest. Now step the fuck back."
JL: Completely agree. And they may have allowed him to feel like he owned the way he was being portrayed. Even if it wasn't his choice, even if he didn't fully control it, choosing braids gave him at least the illusion of self-determination. BS: Or more cynically, was like "if you're really going to fear me anyway, I'm going to drop all pretense of playing that game." Which sort of implies that Iverson was once ready to deal. JL: I don't disagree with that, but I sometimes wonder about whether he was, or if that was just something we assumed as a result of the redemption narrative: out of jail, prodigious talent, father-figure coach who would help him see that potential and walk the righteous path. That imports a sense that he was ready, or willing, but maybe it was just easy to go along with things without any real certainty. BS: Or, let's put it like this: He was at least somewhat humble, and realized it was a new venue, when he first hit the league. Not redemption per se, but pragmatic. Then when the backlash came, he retreated into an especially dark (yes, keep the pun) and reactionary form of Romanticism. JL: Kind of like he threw up his hands and said "I tried to play by the rules, I tried to be nice, but fuck it. You don't seem to care, or get it, so i am just gonna do me." And oddly, doing him, rocking the braids, only reinforced what people were saying. It's like a weird Stockholm Syndrome in some way.
BS: But what about now, when everyone's saying he might fetch nothing on the open market, and has clearly receded into history as the league's major influence? Now it's just marketing, right? Was it just marketing for Melo, too? JL: As you know (i think you know), I think Carmelo is like Common and like A-Rod--Carmelo seems like he's searching for something. I think that his period at Syracuse, when he was the man, and his talent allowed him to rule the game, was illusory. And I think his PR missteps as a pro, and the stigma that he can't win a playoff series, and the fact that his charm and thoughtfulness are often buried underneath the stereotypical trappings of someone in his position--to me, it all points to this directionless-ness. The braids were perhaps a part of cleaving to an archetypal identity that may or may not really be him, but gave him direction.
JL: Oddly, I think he's maybe coming out of it. This season feels different. I think winning at the Olympics helped him. I think doing more than only scoring has helped. He plays and comports himself with more self-possession this year. BS: It's weird, people say he took a step back from other international competition, when he dominated. But yeah, his more focused, mature season is probably the result of the Olympics, too. JL: That's kind of my read on it. and "mature" is a good word. I think he has grown up in some ways. Not to say a grown man, or a self-possessed man, can't have braids. But if the braids are part of a uniform, in effect, and not just a personal preference, they can mean something else. And in the league, thanks to AI, in particular, they can connote some lingering "otherness." BS: Well, I've always thought of Melo as trying to mediate between being the NCAA champ "good son" or alt-Bron "new jack", and the really real heir to Iverson's street cred, since that's what differentiated him from Bron. Now he's proven he's still got street in him. But on some level, as a businessman—the post-Jay hustler archetype that's replaced the Scarface thing as the model of success—he's got to move on and market himself.
BS: In Iverson's case, he kind of preceded all that. For Iverson to, for lack of a better word, assimilate, doesn't have as clear a narrative to it. How does he justify dropping the ultimate symbol of his personal integrity? It really is all about not necessarily changing his image, but becoming less conspicuous. Is that a return to the beginning? Like "just let me play my game, and then sign me based on that." JL: Like hitting the reset button. It's funny that it's so hard for him to do that. other players--players who weren't as singular, and as culturally significant--have been able to do that. But with Allen, it's like people don't even want him to. BS: Well, Melo didn't hit reset per se. He moved on. And that's really the bottom line. At this point, can we even imagine what it means for Iverson to evolve, in terms of game, image, or meaning? Or is he at once an important piece of history and such, doomed in the present.
Real quick, and maybe better designed for the Twitter: When they first announced HORSE, I was deathly afraid this was going to turn into some racial bullshit. I mean, what gave that away harder than the "no dunks" rule, buried deep in the press release? The reason I objected to everyone's jittery Kevin Love nomination is that, like it or not, trick shots are the result of practice. That's (EDIT:) self-fulfilling gym rat shit, and it's almost unreasonable to expect anyone else in the field to pull off your ace in the hole.
Now, to draw an analogy I absolutely hate myself for, it's classical music from a score. Putting Durant, Mayo and Johnson in there, is—arghhh—improvisational. Instead of all aspiring to a set-piece one dude knows like his own hand, you'll have weird combinations of elements emerging on the spot. Okay, so maybe these three will do some preparation, but not like how the Other Horse would go down, or how they would do for the Dunk Contest (P.S. the "white" HORSE with, say, Love, Miller and Dunleavy would be the white Dunk Contest). Am I falling victim to stereotypes here myself? Maybe. Durant could very well decide he has to win this one. But given the kind of players, and personalities, these three are, you know they're not going to come with anything corny, or a shot that it's clear they've spent their whole life working on. I'm thinking lots of high-bounced, backboard use, and range. Like the Dunk Contest of consummate scorers. Now that's got a solid ring to it.
-So after a series of email conversations about applying my "Jewish question" to the realm of African-American folk, Claude Johnson actually did it. Go watch the action unfold over at Black Fives. I won't go much further than that hypothetical of a "black" black guy with a "white" game, and a "white" black guy with a "black" game.
-Since we're back on this, I wanted to post a link to the interview I did with Jeremy at Mixed Multitudes. I think we cleared the air, though I flubbed my most important statement:
The Woody Allen example was a bad, and obvious, one, but when I look at who I am, and my place in American society, I definitely believe in a sense of community based around–at the risk of sounding totally 19th century–a certain ethnic character. In our case, of course, a lot of it has to do with questioning our character, not knowing where we fit in, what’s ours and what isn’t, and why we care that much to begin with.
That was trying to say not only that identity is construed as such, but that it leads to critical, outsider-y perspective on things that revolves around questioning _________, not knowing where __________ fits in, wondering what belongs to who, really, and accepting that we might not care that much about these questions to begin with. Hence the combination or inquiry, fatalism, dissonance, and absurdity that a lot of us dig in the Spanish players.
-I got an email yesterday asking if those Star of David-shaped snowflakes on the breast of yesterday's holiday jersey weren't eerily reminiscent of you-know-what. What's funny is that I only noticed them on Boston's unis, and assumed it was some sly Red Auerbach joke about this time of year. But if Stern does succeed in pissing off some Holocaust survivors, wow, that would be bad for his standing in the cabal.
-I finally saw Milk last night, and proceeded to read the whole online debate over why he's not known, or promoted, as a Jew, whether the film does enough of that or has any obligation to, and what's going on with Jewish publications not picking up on the newfound interest in a great Jewish political leader. Whatever, the movie was very, very good.
SEE COMMENTS. I MEANT TO MUTE MY REACTION, BUT DIDN'T DO SO ENOUGH. NEXT WEEK, POST ON 40 GUNS and THE FURIES TO PROVE I KNOW FILM.
Consider this the preamble to the preamble, which is always an apology of sorts. I have been way out of touch with the NBA these last few weeks. Limited cable access, little time to sneak off and watch a game of my choosing, and time spent (thankfully) with people who don't want to spend a Thursday at home with Barkley and Kenny. I've also been talking non-stop about some of the more axiomatic features of the league, which sort of dries out your appetite for day-to-day trainspotting.
I also have this weird feeling that everything in the league has been destroyed except for the Thunder, though that's probably just some unconscious way of guilt-tripping myself for going slack.
But I feel fully armed and ready to do what I do best—take something I said once already and more forcefully, desperately, throw it in the face of those who would doubt me. Yesterday, I put up a post that inquired into exactly what "the Jewish athlete" meant today. Some commenters, and at least one blog with a bigger readership than mine, took me to task as either questioning Farmar's Judaism (different from Jewish-nes, I think), or being guilty of the worst kind of self-stereotyping.
First off, Farmar's Judaism is unimpeachable, insofar as he takes it seriously, attends services, and was raised by two Israelis. That's more than I can claim. The whole "he's half-black, and plays a blacker game" had some awkward elements of racialized biology that no one really called me on, but the point mainly was that, for whatever reason, when he steps on the floor he's able to embody the basketball mainstream. Apparently, there are still American Jews out there who believe strongly in the imperative of, or at least the right to, assimilation. My Greenberg allusion was meant to date this attitude as something that, in theory, we've moved past. Jews now can assert the ways in which they are different from "white people" without endangering themselves professionally or personally. We won.
But the funny thing about Jews as an ethnic group: Except for the construction of Israeli identity, or going all-out religious, it's hard to pin down exactly what Jewish "authenticity"—the idea I was trying to nail down in my plea for a "Jew-y" player—would be, other than a bunch of semi-embarrassing stereotypes. That's why I was ridiculed for suggesting that I'd like to see such a player; it's regarded as self-satire, as opposed to alive and kickin' identity politics. I'm not content with today's criteria-based, near-polarizing system of classification, which is why personally, the "he attends shul" proof doesn't do it for me. Nor do I want a repeat of the Jewish Jordan fiasco. I want an athlete whose game I can identify with.
Someone suggested that my seach for a "Jew-y" player would ultimately be detrimental to the league in the same way "blacker" players have been. Ummm, okay. Allen Iverson's not perfect, but he's changed the game forever. As someone who, however foolhardily, takes the idea of a "cultural Judaism" seriously, it would mean a lot to me if—at a time when I'm increasingly asked to either shut up and accept my whiteness or ante up and pay membership dues at my local synagogue—there were a player that did something to work toward a contemporary version of this term. I threw out Woody Allen as an example; he was dismissed as "of the past," but while he may need updating (as would, say, Serch), that's the kind of figure I'd like to see reflected in sports, just as Iverson was to hip-hop.
(Sidenote: If anyone super-influential is reading this, please send me that lost footage from Annie Hall where the Knicks—the real Knicks—take on a team of famous philosophers)
So while it may have been unfair of me to single out Farmar, or accidentally turn him into a figurehead, the fact remains that sports are fucking huge in America, and insofar as I have spent a lot of time in this life of mine looking at so-called secular variations on Jewish identity, I would like to see this borne out in basketball. I don't know what I'm looking for, but I know it's not just a guy who self-identifies as Jewish but otherwise bears no stylistic markers. Or a monolithic, and largely implausible, version of what it means to project "Jewish-ness" for all the world to see. The internal tensions and external negotiations of culture are never an easy thing to pin down, and there's over a century of art, music, and literature that attest to this within the Jewish experience. With sports as central to America as they now are, why can't I ask for an athlete who uses this medium to continue in the critical, often confusing, tradition?
Fine, shove this right back at me as "allusive," guilty of reductionism, keeping the people down, and getting in the way of a more transparent, or flexible, definition of "Jew." Maybe I am living in the past, or preoccupied with my own personality quirks. But I'm not done wrestling with the meaning of secular Jewish identity, nor am I entirely comfortable dismissing an inherently unstable history and canon just because we can't give an easy account of where they stand today. That's the sort of work culture does, and big surprise here, but I think sports, and the power of style, are clearly capable of doing some of that work. They have for everyone else, in every other sport.
Imagine a cross between Rudy Fernandez, Shane Battier, and early Joe Johnson. Also, Stephen Jackson sometimes strikes me as really Jewish. Is Doug Moe the one that got away?
If you want to keep going down this path, I'd suggest consulting our NBA Race War, and its sequel.
I'm fucking exhausted. Don't call me Sarah Silverman or ask for a syllabus.
Off the road, finally. Still not home yet, but I got to sit down this morning and think no Macrophenomenal thoughts. By the way, for all of you lamenting my long absence: You could try checking out the Sporting Blog. Not quite the same absurdist overtones, but I get my licks in, and I have been constantly churning out material there throughout this long, fun ordeal. Like today, you can find my reaction to that joint-popping Suns/Cats trade.
So many memories, so many faces, so many photos and media that we may or may not post up here in the future. Yes, KGB Radio night, I'm talking primarily about you. I've also watched hardly a game these last few weeks, so bear with me as I try and muster up a post to prove that yes, I still belong to you, you belong to me, and in heaven no one will tear us apart.
Of all the conversations I had multiple times on the road, none was more poignant, or tricky for me, than the Jordan Farmar one. Apparently, a lot of loyal FD readers, and semi-interested Jews, didn't realize Farmar was of the faith, or the people, or whatever the least PC nomenclature imaginable is these days. Now mark my words, I know the way things work, and have no interest in denying Farmar his full spectrum of cultural heritage. But—and this is more about our society than my own feelings—I don't think Farmar reads as Jewish, on at least two levels. For one, there's the Obama principle. Our real life FBP also happens to be half Heartland, and yet that other half is what defines him. Perhaps because of the context, Farmar is more likely to be recognized as "mixed" (which, of course, still ends up being primarily about black blood), but his Judaism is a technicality, or at least not readily apparent, even if he claims it quite regularly.
And that brings me to the second, really tacky, element of this analysis: Race and style. Once upon a time, the likes of Hank Greenberg and Sandy Koufax has to prove that Jews could outman (quite literally) their gentile brethren. Around the same time, in New York a generation of Chosen Kids were defining basketball as a sneaky, shifty urban game that played into all sorts of stereotypes. Sound familar? Farmar's game is squarely in that first category. He has ups, maneuvers with ease, and conveys a certain sense of equilibrium. Personally, I no longer feel the need to prove that Jews can be mighty and proficient in traditional ways. Perhaps it's the ghost of cultural stuidies, or the influence of Woody Allen on the paths of comets, but—and in some ways, this relates to what Kevin Pelton told me about the WNBA—I would want to see a player who played, well, Jew-y. In the same way that certain players are perceived as having a "blacker" style than others.
What would that game be? I'm not quite sure. I could trot out some stereotypes, but that wouldn't actually get to the heart of what I think is a very real discussion to be had. I've long been obsessed with other countries producing new strains of style; Spaniards like Rudy Fernandez, and established guys like Barbosa and Manu, are the proof of this. Has our own country become more fractured by identity politics than it has united by mass consumer culture?
This is where I would insert the video of the time several early FD operatives played a full-court game against a van full of Hasids in Maine. They thought I was a showboat, which apparently there's a word for in Yiddish. It's been lost forever, though, so instead I will open the floor, and ask if anyone knows whether Doug Moe is Jewish.
BONUS: Gordon Gartrelle with a close reading of the Vince/Obama tee.
Still kind of at a loss for words. The "our team won!" youth riot on Capitol Hill was a little weird, but on the whole, I think the man himself best expressed what this country was feeling last night, way back in 2004:
"America! Tonight, if you feel the same energy that I do, if you feel the same urgency that I do, if you feel the same passion that I do, if you feel the same hopefulness that I do -- if we do what we must do, then I have no doubt that all across the country, from Florida to Oregon, from Washington to Maine, the people will rise up in November . . . and this country will reclaim its promise, and out of this long political darkness a brighter day will come."
I've got a TSB column up now on how this trade affects Iverson's cultural meaning. I wrote it somewhat with Obama in mind—while our next President is extremely difficult to break down according to categories of race, ethnicity, and even immigration, I do believe that the FBP is, well, blacker than he lets on. Not that Obama's not also in many ways a son of the American heartland, but that's one aspect of the multi-faceted life experience that's made him who he is. He's the son of an African, but also someone who identifies as African-American and has spent time in those spaces. So whenever I hear a pundit comment on Obama being stiff, or not natural enough, I wonder if they see how, when he does loosen up, he does read as much "blacker." In other words, and this is where the Iverson to Detroit comparison comes in, does this nation realize it's elected a black president, or just think Obama is an exceptional man who happens to be black?
Slightly related: I've long been tracking Obama's near-uses of the phrase "a change is gonna come" in speeches. He's come close several times, but it was only last night that he finally delivered it in full. In the triumphant past tense:
"It'a been a long time coming, but tonight, beacuse of what we did on this date in this election at this defining moment, change has come to America."
Not trying to advance a "secretly black" meme, or prove how down I am because I've heard Sam Cooke. But this is part of what makes him such an amazing speaker, and candidates: Obama's all things to all people, hits all sorts of notes and connects with everyone. And it's all real.
-I'm feeling this video Chris Bosh made for FanHouse of his immediate reaction. Between him and Jermaine O'Neal, the Raptors might have the most socially conscious frontcourt in the league. Too bad they're in Canada.
-Driving home last night around 1AM PST, some BBC program or other was on. They read a text message from a guy in Kabul expressing, yes, hope and joy over Obama's election. That really set the mind reeling.
Let's talk about sports in politics. Not athletes endorsing candidates, or the need to cast candidates in athletic terms. No, this is the apocalyptic extension of the "he is like me" issue that Dr. LIC treated a few weeks ago. Now, with Palin, we're down to "he is me."
So instead of just peppeting stump speeches with sports metaphors, or, as Obama does, allude to the Packers' loss when in Wisconsin and mention his own Bears misery, these candidates need to throw out the playbook and just talk about sports. Constantly and endlessly. Think about it: First, this election was about gas and corn syrup. Now it's shifted to the apoplectic market which, sorry, is way too abstract and removed from most people's lives. What's the perfect antidote? The National Football League, natch. I swear, if Barack just got up there—during the debate, even—and rattled off ten minutes of non-descript "who's hot, who's not" talk about this year's topsy-turvy beginning, he'd walk away the clear-cut winner. Not just "he watches football, like me," but "his brain is similarly consumed by it."
But of course, it has to be convincing, authentic. And therein lies the hitch. Notice, I'm only talking about the NFL—neither Obama nor McCain can claim a college team of note, unless you count Cindy's Trojans (a net minus?). Plus, as partisan as NFL fans are, they've got nothing on the provinicial trappings of college sports. So good look mentioning any other college team at Ole Miss. . . or finding any other sport that's really real before that audience. That's where the Obama campaign has the edge: Its multi-tiered, situational approach to just about everything could gauge where and when to use this tactic, as well as how much to mention his Bears versus the home team, and what exactly the audience would buy. Contrast that with McCain, whose best gimmick seems to be inserting city-specific Hall of Famers into his P.O.W. tales.
And then there's that tricky issue of race. Look, I know why Obama played up the basketball thing. It earned him cred in the black community, and made him seem young and hip. But even if the sport's no longer highly toxic on the identity politics front, it's still seen as a black game—unless you're laundered by a Big 10 program, or grew up playing in a lunch box. This News One piece by Drew Ricketts is a little strident for me, but it has a Dwyane Wade quote that, while it thrills me, is exactly why Big O's basketball identification could subtlely drag him down:
Wade: Wooooowww.... One thing about Obama is that he has his own style... and that's what we love. He's not the typical presidential candidate. Anyone else who's been in office before him knows that. He's not afraid to showcase his style. He loves to play basketball. He hoops and that's how he stays in shape. He doesn't run on a treadmill. You can go on and on about the arguments of policy and experience, but at the end of the day, hopefully he becomes our president. We'll all be better for it.
All I'm saying is, that's not going to hit voters the same way "that call sucked" is. It might even come across as alien or alienating. So while sports could win this election for someone, in Obama's case, it's going to involve some back-pedalling on his First Baller image. Or least an attempt to reach across the aisle and show that this kind of relationship with sports dones't mean he's shut out of discussing just what's going on with Favre on the Jets. Also, never mention the Chargers. Yeah, on second though, Big 10 alum seems almost as important as religious background when picking national candidates. Because that's what the people are buying: Not an echo of themselves, or someone who feels their pain, but someone who isn't about to feel joy or pain over that high-falutin' stuff outside their purview.
I could see Obama comparing the Bears QB situation to Bush's advisors, or McCain conflating Michael Vick and Jason Campbell. The smart move, though, is to leave all politics and policy behind. Just turn this into a contest to see who can talk sports better. Not more knowledgeably, or passionately, but just who can prove how much football they're really made of.
