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.
The morning after Iverson's press conference, I referred to AI as "the athlete least likely to bare his soul, admit mistakes or appear in the least bit sympathetic unless you bought into his rhetoric." My friend Q. McCall took me to task for it, and after a lengthy chat, I recanted and convinced him to do a guest post. You can also catch his writing over at Swish Appeal.
I once lost a job over an argument about Allen Iverson’s cultural significance.
Actually, it was more a mutual agreement to part ways because things clearly were not going to work out, but that’s beside the point—a dispute over Iverson was ultimately the reason I lost income.
I was a 23-year-old black graduate student at a research university working with a professor at a smaller university on a project designed to “empower” an economically distressed de-industrialized black community. For me, the project embodied exactly the type of community work that I had always wanted to do – bringing together my academic knowledge with the budding activist impulse I had developed during undergrad. It was one way to participate in the ongoing post-Civil Rights struggle for racial equality that my parents (both from Virginia, father from Newport News) had convinced me was the responsibility of an educated black man.
However, a tension quickly emerged between the lead professor and I during the course of the project due to competing definitions of “blackness”.
The week prior to “the Iverson incident”, he sat me down in his university office after I presented him the results of a community survey that suggested we should slightly alter the direction of the project. He responded by telling me how the “white knowledge” that I brought from my university—in this instance, the use of a survey to determine the opinions and needs of the black people we intended to serve—didn’t apply to the folks of this community. My counter-argument—that we cannot understand the needs of the community simply by assuming we know what all black people need—fell on deaf ears.
The image of him wearing a dashiki with his doctoral robes hanging on the door of his office in the comfy confines of the ivory tower while telling me that I didn’t understand the struggle as a young academic is something that will remain forever etched in my memory. It was at that point that my admiration of his work was officially overcome by skepticism over his intentions.
In some ways, the interaction is representative of a generational disconnect that so many who lived through “the struggle” justifiably lament: while they fought and died for increased opportunity, we post-civil rights babies either didn’t take advantage, didn’t appreciate the newfound opportunity, or sold out. Within that framework, I was told in no uncertain terms that I was the sell out based solely on the fact that I attended a “white university”, was using “white methods”, and was honestly just sort of “square”.
It was within this broader context that the job-ending Iverson argument occurred. It was not at all random but an extension of this tension over “blackness” and “authenticity” between us.
The argument began at a dinner party he was hosting. He claimed that he could identify “conscious brothers” merely by the fact that they were wearing dreadlocks and not walking around with sagging pants and cornrows. I chuckled at the simplicity of such an assertion—regardless of what it means to wear dreads, the idea that one can could so confidently assert knowledge about a person’s identity based merely on their physical appearances strikes me not only as bizarre, but anti-intellectual. The statement was even more troubling given our collective investment in improving the conditions of one small black community many of whom have chosen not to sport “conscious” hair styles.
As we went around in circles evaluating a multitude of rappers and other public figures as “thug” and “conscious”, we eventually came to then-Sixers guard Allen Iverson, who had recently come off an outstanding run to the 2001 NBA Finals.
He claimed that Iverson’s swagger, sagging pants, do-rag, and chains hanging from his neck (“bling” was not really part of the lexicon at this time) clearly indicated that he was a “thug”. No longer worried about keeping the job at this point, I blurted out, “That’s ridiculous.” At that moment, the other graduate students in the room—all white—gasped and everyone got quiet waiting for him to respond. Which he of course did.
After he and his more loyal graduate assistant—a white man a few years older than I who had grown up around black people and had thus established his “street cred”—explained to me the strong relationship between sagging pants and thuggery, I responded with a simple question that ultimately got us nowhere: “What has Iverson done to constitute being a thug?”
I listened to him rant, was accused of not understanding the struggle by a white assistant as the professor’s white wife chuckled, and I eventually left early with no intention of working for the man again. I had no desire to have my “authenticity” judged by a university professor wearing a dashiki, nor did I care to listen to him categorically dismiss others based on a priori assumptions of who they are all under the guise of “racial uplift”.
What I found “ridiculous” was his apparently simplistic categorization of black people—whether it be calling me a “sell out” (yet simultaneously surrounding himself with educated white people), dudes wearing dreads “conscious”, or Iverson a “thug”, not to mention establishing his own “revolutionary blackness” by wearing a dashiki in a university office. It was simply too convoluted, contradictory, and hypocritical a standard to tolerate given the nature of the work we were doing.
I probably need not explain at length the problems with casting people into epic characters without granting them the dignity to possess multiple character or personality traits that might fluidly create a unique identity (and not necessarily fit our preconceived notions of who they should be). That’s what makes us human, if you accept Mikhail Bakhtin’s analysis of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s work. Of course, there are times when that can go too far; “liberal individualism” that demands unlimited freedom to define and express oneself disconnected from larger structures can be damaging. Nevertheless, as human beings, one would think that we should all assume responsibility for respecting that there’s an internal world within any person that cannot be accessed simply by seeing them in one press conference or walking down the street.
When we look at representations and personas of black men in particular, it would be naïve to believe that our judgments of them are formed by what we see alone. As bell hooks once said about “rappers like Snoop Doggy Dogg” in 1994, “…it is essential for everyone to remember that they are not only more complex than the way they represent themselves, they’re more complex than the way white society represents them as well. This notion that Snoop Doggy Dog defines himself 'as he really is' is something I reject. He clearly defines himself with a persona that works in cultural production in this society.”
In other words, we must acknowledge that both black male celebrities and the white society that consumes them have a role in the creation of these personae. However, to then take those personae as universal truths that can be applied to anyone, anywhere, without any attempt to understand them on their terms, is problematic at best.
Yet mainstream society has somehow managed to mindlessly conflate “being a thug” with record studio manufactured images of thuggery. It works well for entertainment executives that sell albums to suburban youth with an interest in romanticizing “thug life” as an exotic counter to their own lives, and who possess disposable allowance to support the inquiry. However, the fact that Iverson “fits the manufactured description” is by no means evidence that he consistently exhibited the violent criminal behavior that would constitute thuggery.
Yes, he’s had run-ins with the law, but the facts in the most egregious cases were so unclear that they are almost inadmissible as evidence to substantiate the claim that he is in fact a “thug”. The usual way that people even begin to associate Iverson with being a thug is by linking his image to these artificially manufactured images of “thug life” and our lingering fears of the black “super criminal”.
More than anything, this demonized “AI” persona is the personifcation of stereotype convergence: that of the hypermasculine black male athlete and a record industry manufactured “hip-hop” bravado that has lost its “utopian impulse”, as once described by Cornell West. It is ultimately a shallow caricature of the “hard”, hyper-individualistic, misogynistic, narcissistic, simple-minded, swaggering black male.
It is sad example of how our perceptions are shaped not only by what we see, but also by conceptual frameworks that we draw upon as short hand to “make sense” of the world, as described by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their classic book Metaphors We Live By. The problem is that to the extent that we draw upon pre-existing metaphors to make sense of people, we strip them of the agency to represent themselves as human; while these metaphors frame expectations for behavior, they also irrationally justify us assuming that our perceptions are universal common sense and those who don’t fit can be demeaned, dismissed, mocked, or vilified.
In other words, the idea that Iverson is a thug is a fictive reality conjured up in the racialized imagination of a society that remains fearful of young black men in spite of electing a black man president. To the extent that Iverson’s image resonates with a set of racialized metaphors we live by, he never had the agency to truly be understood.
As such, “AI” can never be separated from the fact that his persona was created in a U.S. society that was built upon racism, that never figured out how to deal with racial diversity at a structural or interpersonal level, and has a tendency to dismiss the very mention of race as a factor in public life as “playing the race card”. However, it doesn’t take much thought to recognize that even in our treatment of athletes, we cannot really escape racialization much less expect that we might reach the post-racial promised land when race is used as a cheap ploy to sell everything from records to detergent.
Iverson is thus simultaneously romanticized for and trapped within a racialized “thug” image: some disaffected inner-city black youth can draw inspiration from him while others lament the burden his image causes in their daily life; some affluent blacks have looked down upon him with self-righteous disdain while others see him as an example of a meritocratic myth in the U.S.; some well-meaning whites have seen him through a romanticized lens that masks fears of an urban lifestyle their families fled long ago while others claimed racial neutrality; fans can cheer his dominant scoring when he’s winning and blame his ball dominance when he’s losing.
What is often—not always—lost is that AI is a product of circumstance in a world that demonizes black men more often than not. In that context, it becomes unreasonable to assume that he would even want to cater to a media that merely perpetuates a distant and shallow racialized portrait of who he is to a mainstream audience that mindlessly consumes shallow images.
So fine, even if Iverson can't play like he used to, doesn't really work with the Sixers current coach or cast and is superfluous once rising star Lou Williams returns, there's this breakthrough, which is as much about us—and for us—as it is Iverson. After a decade of being the athlete least likely to bare his soul, admit mistakes or appear in the least bit sympathetic unless you bought into his rhetoric, Allen Iverson hasn't just come home. He's finally made himself accessible. But that's only part of the equation, because now we might have to try and better understand what Iverson really meant during all those standoff-ish years.
It would be pathological for someone to bare their soul to people who have repeatedly torn him down without any genuine attempt to make sense of him. Within the historical context of this country, it makes even less sense for a black male who is consistently misunderstood and boxed into a manufactured “thug” persona.
Nevertheless, to say that Iverson didn’t appear “the least bit sympathetic”, is now more accessible, and less “standoff-ish” completely ignores the honest ways in which he has indeed demonstrated directness, honesty, and passion in his interactions with the media. Shoals refers to former Sixers teammate Eric Snow in the article, describing how outsiders—us fans and members of the media—never really got to know him. However, it’s also difficult to ignore the many occasions in which he was nothing but honest, opinionated, and passionate. The only reason to dismiss those moments when seeking evidence of a sympathy and accessibility is that they might not have come when or how we expected.
How could you ignore his repeated expressions of gratitude for Georgetown University coach John Thompson? How could you ignore his expressions of respect for former Sixers coach Larry Brown? After his ranting about his frustration with the disproportionate attention to him missing practice, how could you dismiss the Detroit press conference in which he lightheartedly laughed at himself? Even in the infamous practice rant, the point was clear: the man wants to win games.
Ultimately, the evidence does not amount to an unsympathetic, inaccessible, ruthless figure but a human being forced to struggle with a complex set of life circumstances. Even if it did, how much can you legitimately claim to know about a person’s character sitting at home and reading the accounts of a few newsmen and watching a few press conferences?
It shouldn’t take a heartwarming homecoming story and on-camera tears to make it clear that Iverson is a man who loves basketball and most of all loves to win. Unfortunately, that has simply been lost as people continually attempt to cast him as an epic character who fits what they want to believe.
The argument that a superstar athlete should expect this type of treatment is indicative of a sick and ugly sense of voyeuristic entitlement in U.S. society. It’s almost irrational to expect someone to take all that and continue to cater to people who make no attempt to understand him as a person because they’re confined to their own metaphors. In that sense, it’s not so much that he’s inaccessible, as much as truly accessing him would cause a form of cognitive dissonance that would force people to challenge their racialized assumptions. The idea that he is inaccessible speaks more to the inability—and even refusal —of some people to make sense of Iverson as one representation of “blackness” in the U.S. than anything having to do with Iverson himself.
While Shoals rightly suggests that “now we might have to try and better understand what Iverson really meant during all those standoff-ish years”, why does it take him choking up on camera for us to make that attempt? If people have to see him publicly overwhelmed by emotion to feel as though he’s safe, what genuine desire is there to understand the man?
When I chatted with Shoals, he said, “I don't think Iverson was capable of being someone he wasn't, but he kept a lot inside.” If that is so, then the very people who have demonized him penalize him for being neither superficial nor a transparently simplistic person. We could certainly smugly sit back and say, perception is everything and Iverson has merely been caught up in his perception. But commenting on Iverson as though his blackness is not somehow implicated in that perception is either naïve or anti-intellectual.
That’s not to deny that Iverson has some responsibility in the creation of his own image—he has dressed and behaved in ways that certainly seem to resonate with a manufactured “thug” representation. In my present role as teacher, I certainly do my best to prepare young black men for an unfair world not by telling them to hate or embrace it, but to acknowledge it and figure out how to navigate it. Has Iverson navigated the public sphere perfectly? Not necessarily. But at some point we, as observers, have to take some responsibility as intelligent life forms to do more than point fingers and make simplistic assumptions.
As Shoals also said in our chat, “Real thugz don't stick around to have HOF careers.”
Like many athletes before him, Iverson forced the sports world to confront a manifestation of blackness that is bound by both his origin and particular time. Race is the elephant in the room that people are normally frightened to discuss publicly, with friends, or at the dinner table. Perhaps it’s time to start discussing that rather than making clearly racialized assumptions from a color-blind stance—or claiming to have the capacity to evaluate one’s character based on how they dressed.
Neither is a particularly valuable way to proceed toward the post-racial society that so many people yearn for to relieve them of the burden of shielding themselves from the reality of race.
Before I get serious, take a look at this list of records I'm too lazy to put on eBay just yet. And listen to the newest Disciples of Clyde-cast, featuring Kelly Dwyer. Will be posted here later in the week, but it's there for you, now. Thanks!
I have never felt a post as profoundly as the one I've labored over since Monday night. Various abortive attempts have included "I want to be free. The more we know, the more we want to tear it all down"; a discussion of whether the relationship between knowledge and ardor in sports was like or unlike that in sports; digging around for a Heidegger quote that worked out of context; a tangent on Cotto where I wrote just like Shoefly; and the question of elitism in non-snobby watching, i.e. "I get this shit so much better than everyone else around me."
But what I really should've done is listen to my heart, to pay attention to the largely sports-driven moods that have so thoroughly burnt, cleansed, and smushed me since Saturday. The long and short of it is this: I watch sports like an expert, even if I don't know what I'm talking about. I feel, but I also look for details and seek out analytic angles. We are all guilty (if that's the word) of this to some degree; no one is born into sports. Even those who don't know much are still, as highly-evolved cognitive beings observing an activity bound by rules and order, looking to make sense of it all. Greatness is always contextual, and if pushed to its logical extreme, at the distant horizon of Dr. Jack Ramsey we find either the grandest palaces of Jordan and Pippen, or the strike-team ambushes that strike heads from off of idols' shoulders.
Originally, I thought I'd come out of Manny/Jennings/John Wall/remembering Iverson blitz having hit on a new kind of fan experience. Call it innocence, call is blissful ignorance, throw out your favorite lines about the eyes of children or being on acid. As I watched Pacquiao/Cotto surrounded by a large extended family whose knowledge of boxing ranged from encyclopedic to nil, all of whom responded to Manny's space-and-time defying combos with the same oohs and aaahs (admittedly, unorthodox technique and cultural affinity played some role here), it dawned on me: There exists a type of athlete so crackling, inventive, and forceful, and elemental, that they become the great equalizer. It doesn't matter how intently you've followed their career, or a sport. When Pacquiao goes on the attack, Jennings launches into one of those trances where swagger, will, and basketball IQ find themselves in perfect harmony, John Wall hits a game-winner as if to say "enough, it's time to start this season", or Iverson's latest ugh-fest sends us all scurrying back to video of the young AI (funny how different those initials sound now as a nickname, almost like Roman numerals) . . . we find ourselves in a state of wonder that strips away all of our hours and hours of learning.
That was the thesis. These players are ultra-accessible because they tap into a different part of our psyche, infectious and impossibly popular because of the wonderment they inspire. And for those of us who have seen it (and them) all before, each time it happens, it's like we're seeing it for the first time, like we may never even have seen the sport before. I don't want to reduce it to pure aesthetics, or the quote I read somewhere (anyone?) about basketball appealing most to casual fans because of the highlights and sheer poetry of movement. I still maintain that the narrative of a football game is easier to follow, but whatever. I think that one of the reasons it feels natural to include a boxer in here is that, if on some level basketball attracts us with its spectacle of dashing, cutting, and leaping, then boxing is a fist-fight—pretty basic human experience—potentially raised to the level of magic and mystery.
I don't want to say they transform the mundane, because that completely undermines the competitive and technical aspects. However, these athletes affect hit us right in the reptile brain, and send us reeling from there. I don't really think this describes the typical viewing experience of the fan who knows not to ask. My sense is that, for the most part, sports become easier to invest one's self in the more you know about them, and vice-versa. The trick is that this class of athlete short-circuits this relationship. They don't transcend the burden of understanding, they tear down the very parameters by which understanding is so strictly tied into spectatorship. Call it ecstatic viewing, performance without description, or the belief that some moments in sports can cause sports to fall away and just sit there in front of you, beaming, as if their power were inherent, their expressiveness final, and their ends, inevitable, if not irrelevant.
This isn't Kobe ruthlessly working his way through the end of a game, but a wisp of a 20 year-old doing it all in one fluid motion, as if to come up for air would be to let in a host of distractions and contradictions for which neither he—nor we—need confront. Not during this window into a kind of sport beyond sport that never risks cheapening itself or its devotees. One that can't last forever and yet this past week, seems to have.
Hit up another WNBA game last night. This time it was the Storm vs. the Sun, notably mostly for the presence of Lindsay Whalen. While I may have misspelled her name on Twitter (thanks to dude who corrected me immediately!), there was something to her game that seem fairly lacking in what I've seen of the WNBA: Meanness.
First, to step back from the flames of real provocation, a word or two on Whalen. I was serious when I twitted that she doesn't even need the ball to operate masterfully from the point. Depending on how you look at it, it's either quasi-mystical, or the kind of what people used to say about Deron Williams ("he gets hockey assists and stays within the system") before dude came to life, but true.
She gives it up almost as soon as she crossed half-court, or posts up at the top of the key, Cassell-style, but as a way of attracting attention and feeding someone else. And these aren't passes for assists; mostly, they set into motion a series of obvious events (two, three, four passes) that result in an open shot. Her teammates usually miss, and Whalen herself can hit the lane strong and sink jumpers at will, but whatever. She's bigger than that. Closest NBA comparison: Old Jason Kidd, if old Jason Kidd were young and could shoot.
(Speaking of which, last night I decided that comparing NBA to WNBA players is the logical next step of NBA esoterica. Like when Kevin told me "Darko was supposed to be what Lauren Jackson is." These days, everyone knows everything about every random player. If you value elitism and obscurity in your fandom—and buy my argument that the WNBA is a variation on the NBA, not an inferior product like college—then welcome to the new frontier.)
Most notably, though, Whalen is bad. She talks non-stop, plays the whole game with a scowl on her face, and stared down the ref at the half. I even think she a teammate might have been restraining her a little. This is just not the kind of stuff I've seen thus far from any other WNBA player, even someone like Cappy Pondexter or Tanisha Wright who have the kind of game that we'd legitimately expect some swagger from. Everything is very polite, matter-of-fact, and even good-natured—as it remains unquestionably competitive. During that first game, Taurasi pulled off an absolutely devastating block, and stood over her victim, yapping for a second. The whole thing was so foreign, she didn't even get a tech called.
The WNBA markets itself, and arguably, survives as, a positive, family-friendly experience. There are about a billion things about gender and sexuality and stuff that can be said here, but to cut to the chase, you have to wonder if attitude is somehow at odds with this program. I know it's shocking to hear a snarling, feisty white girl described as having "attitude"—and maybe there's a semantic difference between "attitude" and "an attitude"—but it just seems like there's very little edge to the players, in every conceivable place you could conceivably find it.
I come neither to condone or condemn this aspect of the WNBA, except that all this positivity is going to start grating on me at some point. Or at least feel forced. Flash to the league that everyone reading this site knows and loves. Without a doubt, NBA ball is at its best—from the standpoint of any kind of fan—when players get pissed, involved, intense, etc., provided this doesn't lead to them forcing shit. At the same time, I have no problem saying that my least favorite part of games is fan ugliness/attitude. I understand wanting your team to win and all that, but it doesn't excuse being an ignorant dick. I honestly believe that the Falling Down/Taxi Driver-like turn in spectator-hood is as much to blame for all the negativity surrounding the NBA as the seflish thug players are.
But enough about me and my ideal world. Why couldn't the WNBA encourage a crowd of sweetness and light while encouraging players to, I don't know, get a little more raw. I'm not saying they should argue every call, but that league needs more Whalen. By that same token, just because NBA players are talking trash and shoving each other, it doesn't mean the moron next to me has to act like he's watching Jesus get killed. Emotion can be personal without triggering some flight or flight shit. It's called being a grown-up.
That was really draining. I will leave you with a thought from Q. McCall, who has taken it upon himself to make me the world's most famous WNBA convert. To paraphrase, Sue Bird starts over Whalen on the U.S. National Team. Bird also has the image thing down pat. Whalen isn't seen as Bird's equal, even though from a basketball standpoint, she's in many ways better. You have to wonder how much that has to with her demeanor—do some regard it as unnecessary, or even a drawback to her game?
Someone who knows this shit better than me can tell me if Latasha Byears is relevant here.
I said my basic peace on the Rashard Lewis suspension over at The Baseline. Read here for my (ahem) baseline analysis, plus the Manny coincidence. Excuse me if I'm not foaming and fuming about this one.
To get a little deeper, even if you want to suspect certain players of juicing—especially those guys who enjoy working out—you've got to look at these suspicions in context. Same goes for the Lewis thing. Baseball and football are knee-deep in PED problems, and obviously have a culture that promotes and enables them. Does anyone have any evidence that such a thing exists in basketball? A suspension like this is, to be sure, startling. But it's almost as if people assume that, if MLB and the NFL are dirty, then surely that same climate must be present in basketball.
I know there's no consensus on whether NBA players could benefit. Even if they could, I'd have to get some inkling that it wasn't just a few isolated cases. That's now how it works in those other sports, so why would it be like that here? And saying "it's in other sports" is, like I said, a total fucking fallacy. Show me the sea change in play, in stats, in injuries; the rumors that make it past the ESPN boards; more than one person ever suspended for a non-diet pill violation. As I've said many a time, that the league is all too willing to share information about PED suspensions, but stays mum on hard drugs, doesn't just imply they have nothing to hide—they want it out there just how unworried they are, how minor these trangressions are expected to be.
Now tell me, as much as baseball was in denial, would it ever had gone out of its way to craft a policy that was so casual and transparent about PEDs? Conversely, while I may not be the world's biggest insider, I think I'd at least have once heard—from people who know—that a player was suspected. Which wouldn't even in itself convince me, since it takes more than one person to change the course of PED history. Unless you believe Jose Canseco's "I am the Messian of steroids" crap.
What a little honesty can do. Obama suggests that it might be stupid to arrest a cranky old public intellectual in his own home, and it overshadows the most important facing the (non-voting) American populace today. Stephen Marbury sustains 24 hours of online rant 'n' rave, and comes out on the other end provoking a range of emotions . . . if you consider disgust, annoyance, amusement, bemusement, and meta-voyeurism range. Here you go, your hybrid media event of the week, both sides manufactured, both ultimately very revealing.
To repeat something I said on Twitter: Marbury plays basketball for (roughly) the same city that Skip Gates was humiliated in. That's when you realize how, in their utter disparity, these two stories end up contradicting and reinforcing each other.
Dr. LIC called to my attention the following Stanley Fish passage, in today's NYT:
When an offer came from Harvard, there wasn’t much I could do. Gates accepted it, and when he left he was pursued by false reports about his tenure at what he had come to call “the plantation.” (I became aware of his feelings when he and I and his father watched the N.C.A.A. championship game between Duke and U.N.L.V. at my house; they were rooting for U.N.L.V.)
There was some internal debate over whether U.N.L.V was desirable because they represented the antithesis of Duke—including in all matters of style, culture, and race—or simply because they weren't Duke. Dr. LIC and I came to the consensus, though, that it didn't matter. The Times was never going to skew that radical, or near-essentialist. But I almost wish that Fish had, one way or the other, definitively let us know. Not because I think that important African-American figures owe us a daily update on their version of "Blackness," and relative relationship to the latest definitions of the terms.
No, I just think this kind of inkling would make the story more intelligible to members of the public who see Gates as having left himself behind and flipped out. Who don't see how the PBS figure connects to this outrage and belligerence. On the one hand, it's evidence of certain "tendencies" in Gates that could be used against him. But it also serves to undermine the myth of the good/bad Negro. Gates could be the paragon of respectability, and yet still have this sense of alienation simmering inside him—without it showing through except under the most exigent circumstances. That's proof that not he flipped out, but that anyone assuming that an angry Harvard professor is acting erratically just doesn't get it.
Back to saying all that you mean, and putting stock in the idea that the world need know that we exist on multiple levels, or registers. One can override most, and keep us secure. However, without those strains of dissent or self-contradicton, it becomes all the easier for a public figure to be portrayed as "lost" or "ruined" when he goes down that avenue. Show that they're connected, and people start to understand how these strains can co-exist. This, and not the politics of post-racial blandness, is Obama's most important political gimmick.
When I wrote that piece on Iverson and shifting definitions of authenticity, I spend way too much time explaining what I thought about AI. That really was neither here nor there. I also was wary of bringing hip-hop into the picture, because everyone knows I don't count there at all. But that's the analogy I was going for. Iverson was hip-hop to the core because, from a young age, he learned to make his public and professional face almost formally, or at least over-determinedly, fiery and uncompromising. Say what you will about his heart, or his production on the court, but as an athlete and public figure, Iverson never backed down, believed primarily in his own self-determination, and in that, met that era's fairly intentional, inorganic definition of "realness."
If that gets murky in basketball terms, just think about it vis a vis rap. One can be earnest, or know how he got to a point of playing a part, while still having to suppress contradictory strains of personality or behavior. Or creativity. Or style. So fine, argue about Iverson's career all you want. As an icon, he's associated with that strange space where fierce honesty can lead you down the path of self-limitation. Like Richard Nixon.
All of which brings us back to Marbury. In that Iverson ditty, I concluded that his stubbornness/integrity had given way to something more fluid, flexible and, if not complex, at least more stem cell-like among athlete images. Twitter brings us athletes watching their manners, sometimes, acting like themselves, mostly, and all in all, makes the Jordan/Iverson struggle seem like two prehistoric gods who battled to the death and left only pragmatism in their wake (note: any and all propositions that involve Obama and Twitter together are true.). The dark—for lack of a better word—side of this new access is UStream, which seems to attract only players who have the most to lose by having an unfiltered camera on them (or sprung on them) for hours on end.
J.R. Smith, we got you. Brandon Jennings may have been blindsided, but it's not accident he was mixed up in that world of new media marketing. And now Marbury's marathon spazz-session which, at its best, hammered home for me Dr. LIC's comparision of Steph to Tracy Jordan/Morgan, and how our inability to tell the difference between the two Tracys was something far more sad than just "dude playing himself." The tragedy of Iverson is that, while he spent so much time doing what he thought steeled him best against adversaries, and gave him the greatest, can't-trust-no-one chance for survival, he's also funny, charismatic in the grand warm sense of yore, and known for taking his art seriously, and game as art.
"Allen took psychocybernetics to a new level," [high school athletic director] Kozlowski recalls. Today, Iverson doesn't like to talk about how he does what he does on the basketball court. "I just do it," he says. Partially, like any artist, he is wary of overanalyzing his gift. But it could also be that he's known since high school that the real explanation defies easy answers, that the answer is, at heart, both beneath and above the level of language, and connected, on some level, to his psyche.
Cybernetics has to do with learning to understand a higher dimension after you break your nose, or something, and really, this plus the "unplugged" Iverson is one of the great lost opportunities of the modern marketing age. Did he jump or was he pushed? Remember those adidas bloopers that got yanked from YouTube once they blew up? Adidas eventually put some factory-sanctioned ones up for T-Mac, but Iverson's never returned.
Then, there's Stephon Marbury, whose last 24-hours speak for itself. Like it or not, that's Marbury. Try and position his performance in opposition to his career, or write it off as a stunt. But the very conception of it is totally weird. The mainstream media pushes binaries, or at least set models, and we buy into them. Marbury may have all along had the warning signs of a grade-A weirdo, but we were too busy trying to decide if players were Iverson or Jordan to connect the dots. The behavior with the Knicks certainly helped things, and yet that was taken as "acting out" in the same way that ultimately, Gilbert Arenas's persona served to make him seem more sane than the initial anecdotes that came out.
Staring into the abyss, sailing into the heart of darkness without you calling me racist. That's the shock, and retroactive head-slap, that this Marbury thing brought for me. Where have all the truly odd people gone in sports? We squelched them out as much as the corporations did. For better or worse, now there's nowhere for any of us to hide.
If people like Skip Gates were not only allowed, but expected, to have layers to them, the range of their personality would be harder to dismiss or reduce to an unflattering photo. If sports culture more often took into account that jocks are a sample of the population at large (some gay, some depressed, some indecisive) then this Marbury thing would've been a close-up on a landscape we'd known had been there all along. And instead of our judgments being cynical, we would know that the cynicism rested purely within our own hearts.
With the draft dead and summer league weeks away, it's time to ponder other matter. Hence, we turn to Jim Ruland for some sports/relationship advice. Jim is the author of Big Lonesome, a collection of short stories, none of which are about Chris Kaman.
Now you’ve done it. You’ve gone against your best instincts and worst intentions. You’ve risked ridicule from your friends and put your free time (to say nothing of your finances) in serious jeopardy. You have fallen irrefutably, irredeemably in love.
They said be careful. They said look before you leap. But did you listen? No. You threw caution to the wind and pitched yourself over the cliff. You’re like someone with an incurable disease: there’s no hope for you.
Now you find yourself at the crossroads, ready to take the next step and reveal yourself for what you truly are.
A fan.
(You probably thought I was going to say “alternative lifestyle enthusiast” didn’t you? If you did, that means you’re probably a Dallas Cowboys fan, which is more or less the same thing.)
This is a serious dilemma. Potential mates will look past a lot of flaws if the positives outweigh the negatives--lack of education, staggering credit card debt, your asshole friends--but once you’re outed as a sports junkie, it’s only a matter of time before it becomes obvious that you are the asshole friend.
You know those relationship red flags they’re always talking about in a certain type of magazine that usually has Oprah on the cover? It’s not a metaphor. The red flag is your team colors. But there’s no need to surrender. You can win your squeeze over by following these simple steps:
INTRODUCING YOUR SIGNIFICANT OTHER TO YOUR TEAM
The logical first step is to bring your S.O. to a game, right?
Wrong. First of all, most professional games are long, dull and boring. Being a fan, you do not comprehend this. “Boring? There’s nothing boring about the Lakers/Colts/Red Sox!” To demonstrate how wrong you are, read this review of a performance of “The Nutcracker” by the City Ballet of San Diego. Couldn’t hack it, could you? Now try to imagine being there. For most non-hoops/football/baseball fans, attending a sporting event is like this. Times twenty.
The key to a successful first step in sports fandom immersion is controlling the environment. I don’t recommend watching the game at home for a number of reasons: 1) Old habits die hard. If the game’s tied going into the fourth quarter are you going to remember that she’s even there? 2) You have to clean and/or your parents will embarrass you. 3) You don’t want her to see your LeBron James puppet theater.
But where do you take her? A lot depends on the sport. Here’s a short list ranked from the easiest to most difficult on the conversion scale:
1. Hockey: Really. Everyone loves violence. Most people won’t admit it, but it’s true. Plus, if you’re a hockey fan, chances are you live in a shithole and she’s as starved for quality entertainment as you are. If you’re a transplanted NHL fan, all bets are off. I have a friend in San Diego who is a hardcore hockey nut and on most weekend nights he can be found trolling the Gaslamp Quarter for vacationing Canadians. Sad, very sad.
2. Basketball: It’s fast, it flows, it’s graceful, and it’s acrobatic. It’s also screamingly obvious. Either the ball goes in the bucket or it doesn’t. It’s also exceptionally difficult. We all know people who are convinced they could play pro ball if only their knee hadn’t blown out. Not so with basketball. (Are you 6’9”? Do you have freakishly large hands? Do you have the legs of a gazelle and the heart of an assassin? Then STFU.) The athletes do things on the court that we can only dream about and they do it on the regular and, perhaps most importantly, we can see their facial expressions while they do it. I’m going to suggest it’s poetry in motion or anything like that, but it’s at least the equivalent of a muscular species of doggerel.
3. Football: Let me say this once and get it out the way: football is the most complex game in the history of mankind. What else requires a 53-man roster, a dozen coaches, a few dozen assistants and a small army of equipment people to make the enterprise possible? (Warfare, maybe.) And football is burdened with more Byzantine rules than any one person can be expected to absorb in a single afternoon season. But when an offense or defense executes its game plan it’s astonishing to watch. And if it’s done when the clock is ticking down and everything is on the line, there are few things more dramatic than a come-from-behind victory. Also the fact that the games occur just once a week also works in your favor. It’s a tough sell, but it’s helped along by all the food and fanfare that is considered part of the pageantry.
4. Horse Racing: Don’t believe me? Have you ever seen an actual horse? I’m kind of sort of kidding here but the point that needs to be made is that just about anything is more enjoyable than televised baseball and I say this as a baseball fan. An afternoon spent watching a game of baseball at home is a form of early-onset oldness. You know what goes well with televised baseball? Newspapers and naps. Next thing you know you’ll be drinking prune juice and watching Matlock.
5. Baseball: But only if you’ve had your hip replaced.
THE FIRST SPORTS DATE
I recommend an upscale sports bar. The key is to make it as normal a date as possible with sports as an added bonus. A place that is an official team bar is good because it proves that your preoccupation is shared by others.
A word to the wise: make sure it’s not the place where you normally watch the game as Murphy’s Law dictates that the rival sports fan you almost got into it with or drunken cougar you nearly took home three seasons ago will resurface and put your plans in peril. If you’ve been bounced from all the local watering holes, plan a picnic and listen to the game on the radio. Remember, it’s not like going to the movies where you put all interaction on hold. At the sports bar you have to talk and stuff.
It goes without saying that you will be recording the game and watching it later with the phone turned off and all of your rituals in effect (i.e. burning sage, donning unis, heating up the nacho cheese).
INTRODUCING YOUR S.O. TO YOUR “FRIENDS”
Breaking in a new lover is like breaking in a baseball glove: you have to be rough. You’ve followed my advice and taken the first step and been generous (but not too generous) with the lubricating oil, now it’s time to stick a ball in your lover’s mouth and stuff him or her under the mattress—too far, maybe? The point is you’re going to have to expose your new fling/life partner/mail-order sex slave to a little harsh treatment so when things really get serious they’re battle-tested and ready. I’m talking about introducing them to your friends. Three words: proceed with caution.
There are two kinds of friends: the people we like and the people with whom we watch sports. The two aren’t synonymous. I’m not going to spend the day on a boat fishing with some asshole I can’t stand, but I’ll spend an equivalent amount of time watching the game with him, regardless of how many warrants, divorces and/or DUIs the guy has. Friends come and go but a fan is a fan.
The best scenario for introducing your S.O. to your friends is at a game-watching party held at someone’s house who is extremely successful. This sends the message that successful people are Philadelphia Eagles fans, too. (Just kidding. There’s no such thing as a successful Philadelphia Eagles fan..) There should be a mix of people, male and female, married and single, just like a beer commercial. This may take some effort, some careful planning, possibly even the hiring of actors and bribing of affluent acquaintances. And it must be done in such a way that your S.O. feels like they’re in a beer commercial without actually being aware of it.
TAKING YOUR S.O. TO THE BIG GAME
You’ve taken in some games together, got the “friends” introduction out of the way—now it’s time for the next step: going to a game. Some tips:
1. Don’t cheap out. Get good seats. A fan might be happy to be in the same city as their favorite sports team, but a casual, semi-interested observer needs to be able to actually see the game in order to experience it. Go figure.
2. Be prepared but don’t over-prepare. Going to a game is a colossal pain in the ass. Fans frequently overlook this. Remember the ballet example. Would you tailgate to a ballet? Sit in the parking lot for an hour afterwards because the traffic is grid-locked? Risk being groped in long bathroom lines filled with drunks? (Don’t answer that.) There’s nothing you can do about these things but a little preparation goes a long way. Some things you should never be without during a first date to a game: sunscreen, aspirin, blanket, handy wipes, first aid kit, snacks, full tank of gas, and a shitload of cash.
BE A FRONTRUNNER: Everyone loves a winner. What better way to demonstrate your dominance over the rest of the species than by aligning yourself with newly anointed champions? So go right ahead and dress up in matching Lakers gear. On second thought, maybe you shouldn’t.
BAIT & SWITCH: If you know you can’t control yourself during the NBA playoffs, feign interest in another sport that you don’t really care about as a way to get your S.O. used to the idea that you’re a sports fan, while still providing the attention and consideration that will prove impossible during the Western Conference Finals . This doesn’t make it easier, but it shortens the learning curve.
BE CASUAL: I was at a hardcore New York sports fan’s house the other day and his collection of jerseys, bats, balls, and other memorabilia was the most impressive I’ve ever seen. What made it so cool is that he had the stuff lying around. You could get close to it, pick it up, get intimate with history. He’s clearly obsessed, but because he wasn’t super intense about his stuff he came off like a normal person. It’s like he was saying, This is a big deal to me, but I don’t expect you to feel the same. Don’t try this at home if you have pets. You’re going to look pretty silly with your arm up your dog’s ass after Fido scarfs down that Ricky Henderson batting glove.
THE ULTIMATE, FAIL-SAFE WAY TO CONVERT YOUR S.O. INTO A SPORTS FAN: If none of the steps above work, do what I did: marry someone who went to high school with a player on your favorite sports team
Today’s FD guest lecturer is Chi Tung, a man who may or may not refer to himself as the Chinese Stallion (after all, it is what his name means). When he’s not wearing lensless glasses for a tech show on state-run Chinese television, he moonlights as a writer, for publications ranging from the Huffpo to Asia Pacific Arts.
Now that the 2009 Houston Rockets have bowed out for good (bless their scrappy hearts), it’s as good a time as any to turn down all that red glare, and understand what actually matters. There will be talk of caging and uncaging the pitbull that is Ron-ron, whether the collective talents of Lowry/Brooks are lesser or greater than the parts of their sum, and of course, T-mac’s further descent into the abyss. But all that pales in comparison to the made-for-Beyond-the-Glory (as directed by Werner Herzog) trajectory of one Yao Ming, and his newfound FD-ness.
Prior to these playoffs, Yao had yet to have a truly defining NBA moment—at least, not one that didn’t end in head-shaking ignominy (see: Robinson, Nate). Redemption, then, has been thrice as nice to him in ’09—the flawless shooting exhibition he put on in a game-one dismantling of the Blazers that caused them to rejigger their entire defensive gameplan; the gutsy fourth-quarter points he notched against the Lakers in Game One after a near-catastrophic collision with Kobe; and the outright refusal to leave Game Three when he was noticeably limping and would later be diagnosed with a broken foot. Again.
On paper, these images lack the naked transcendence of a Lebron buzzer beater, or the basketball-is-hip-hop undressing of Tyronn Lue in the wake of an AI crossover. But they’re important nonetheless—because mythmaking relies as much on the power of perception as it does shock-and-awe. Pundits and bloggers alike tend to talk about Yao’s accomplishments like they’re being asked to pen a hagiography—as if being compelled to assume the role of China’s sacrificial lamb-cum-cash-cow has earned him a lifetime of faint, backhanded praise. Under their breath, though, there’s more than a whiff of denigration: what kind of dominant big man doesn’t dunk the ball with malice, they ask? Or put his imprint on games by demanding the ball more often? Or, in so many words, tell the Chinese government to step the eff off so his achy-breaky feet can heal properly?
In isolation, these mutterings sound like provocations made by Right Way absolutists. But the things you hear in China are equally problematic, albeit for entirely different reasons. The other day, I offhandedly remarked to one of my Chinese colleagues that though it’s a damn shame about Yao’s latest injury, it’s some consolation to see him getting recognition from the MSM as a tough, resilient sonofabitch. His response? That in many ways, Yao has always been the quintessential Chinese male—he has big, brass balls, but doesn’t feel the need to tell you about them, a la Sam Cassell. It’s just one of many instances where Yao-as-cultural-trope trumps Yao-as-basketball-player. And one of many instances where Americans and Chinese alike fail to appreciate the true essence of Yao.
Liberated fandom allows us to root for who we want, in the ways that we want, largely because of our desire to claim ownership over a certain value or aesthetic. But in China, the who and the how take a backseat to the just-is. One could argue that Chinese fandom is inherently liberated in ways that Chinese politics—and American fandom—are not. Without the self-reflexiveness that comes part and parcel with Americanness, Kobe just is someone who makes the game look absurdly easy and fun, not a lightning rod for varying definitions of greatness. NBA player jerseys are worn unironically and with little regard for street cred—hence, the inexplicable popularity of Shane Battier. Even Chinese fandom, as it relates to domestic pro clubs, seems curiously anachronistic—rather than drawing upon clearly defined geographical lines, it functions more like club soccer on a smaller scale. Mercenaries carry little stigma because so little is at stake—replace the name Cristiano Ronaldo with Bonzi Wells, and you’ll understand why.
And yet, through all of it, Yao remains—he has all the responsibilities of a national monolith, but none of its perks. In other words, Chinese people may look to him for inspiration, but rarely can they articulate what they intend to do about it. Part of that is due to the building-castles-in-the-sand nature of globalization. In basketball parlance, it’s like seeing the torch-passing from Yao to Yi as a sweeping, old-school-to-new-school progression, and swearing it’s only a matter of time before China’s own version of Ricky Rubio is releasing mixtapes during the offseason.
I’ve beaten this drum before on my Huffpo beat, but it bears repeating—China is a country containing multitudes within multitudes. Those multitudes ebb and flow in zigzag fashion, but that hasn’t stopped the Western hemisphere from hurtling toward linear categorizations and literal-mindedness. We see Yao pushing his body to limits for a cause that seems far flung from everyfan realities. (Zig) But at varying points throughout his career, we’ve also seen him be silly, wise, cocky, fatalistic, self-aware, angry, unflappable, rattled-to-the-core. (Zag) If Kobe is the man of a million Machiavellian faces to his detractors, then Yao is the fragmented, pixilated visage of a billion reluctant fans and their foibles, few of whom are willing or able to defend him as being unassailably great.
So does that make Yao a blank canvas that leaves the etching of destiny to others? If you think that, then I have an autographed poster of Antoine Walker I’d like to sell you. When Yao first came into the league, he was eminently quotable, but in a way that seemed tailormade for caricatures stemming from Asian Mystique. He would alternate between zany philosophical musings and carefully constructed nationalist mantras. After the Beijing Olympics ended, he even went so far as to say his “life was over.” Not so the Yao of today. Though he remains quip-y (his crack about America’s National Anthem being his favorite song because he hears it 365 days a year seems a pretty cleverly disguised rebuke of compulsory patriotism), Yao no longer speaks like Yoda-meets-Sun-Tzu, and refers instead to personal triumphs and priorities with something resembling ebullience.
While chronic injuries have robbed T-mac of his once-irrepressible vitality, they seem to have reinvigorated Yao, who now plays, acts, and talks like someone who can’t be bothered with the weight of tradition or the double-edged sword of transparency, whereas both remain major hang-ups for China. Perhaps he’s finally realizing that, unlike the Lebrons and Kobes of the world, nothing is preordained, and that he can rewrite the script as many times as he sees fit. In a way, the mundane inevitability of Yao’s injuries have helped put his mortality into clearer focus—it helps liberate him from our static, decontextualized ideas of spectatorship, not to mention the stale notion that his multi-facetedness is somehow artificially conceived.
That same paradigm exists with China—the more we treat its symbols as fuzzy math, the more easily flummoxed we become. As liberated fans, we should know better. After all, we can take a Right Way canard like “let the game come to him” and turn it into a triumph of individual style. In Yao’s case, though, letting the game come to him is about letting everything else go. Only then does he know what’s still worth holding on to.
Michael Jordan never kicked Craig Ehlo in the head. For years I was sure he did: Cleveland, first round of the 1989 Playoffs, Jordan hits The Shot and hysterical with joy cuts Craig Ehlo down with an accidental boot salute; Ehlo drops like a drop-kicked sack of bricks and the assault is largely ignored—in the making of history, after all, the vanquished are irrelevant. Cue the Legacy. Awesome.
During this year’s Playoffs, The Shot has resurfaced in heavy commercial-break rotation, and each time it plays I’m thrown into painful paroxysms of embarrassment at drunken arguments I’ve had with strangers—“He kicks him, man, I’m telling you. Just watch for it.” But, fuck: Jordan’s Nikes are clearly nowhere near anyone, Ehlo’s collapse is only out of grief and shame, and it turns out I’ve deluded myself for two decades. I don’t feel so bad, though: sure, my Shot-and-Kick was a fabrication, but so is the actual footage.
While nba.com claims, “As the ball nestled through the net, Jordan pumped his fists in jubilation, completing a video highlight for the ages,” this is a moment that has only ever existed in replay. Those watching the game on TV didn’t see Jordan’s celebratory histrionics; the original CBS telecast cut immediately (and bafflingly, in retrospect) to the reaction of then-Bulls coach Doug Collins. If the NBA is to be believed, the popularized version of The Shot ranks with the moon landing and JFK assassination among the great, suspect, live experiences in American television history—regardless that the spread-eagle jump and fist-pumps only surfaced later. But we need a moment to commemorate the birth of a legend, and so the redux has been fed to us and has become, now, how we remember something most of us never saw.
The “Where will amazing happen this year?” ad campaign is weird for a lot of reasons. First, “where” seems an odd choice of interrogatives. The host city or corporate-sponsored stadium hardly seems significant—rather than the victories of teams, to me “amazing” connotes sublime moments of individual athleticism, like The Shot, that linger in our collective memory. (E.g. I have no idea how deep that Bulls team went in the ’89 Playoffs, but I do know, and can explicitly picture, how Jordan hangs in the air, waits for Craig Ehlo to land, and then bangs that jumper.)
“Where” is especially lame when you consider the alternatives: “Who will [make] amazing happen” acknowledges both the simmering potential of superstars and the possibility for unlikely heroes, “when” insinuates suspense-laden expectation, “how” a reverence for physical theatrics, “what” = mystery, and “Why will amazing happen (and why will it matter)?” could even be (existentially, abstractly, and especially if voiced by Werner Herzog) kind of funny. But we get “where”—right.
Anyway, aside from the fact that it’s a clunky non sequitor of a motto, the corresponding commercials make me uncomfortable on a more personal level. I’m of an age, demographic and cultural moment that filters my enjoyment of the NBA, like most things, through a scrim of nostalgia. As a result, I’m routinely compelled from the present to a poignant anchor in the past: the slight shudder of melancholy, for example, I suffer when a former star I grew up loving (Sam Cassell, say) checks in for garbage time at the end of a blow-out. And I like my version of the past just fine. I don’t want it co-opted and fed back to me as advertisements.
Mainly what gets me about WWAHTY? is its perversion of nostalgia. The highlights—shown without context, slowed down, flipped to black and white (= The Past), soundtracked to the sad parts of the score from Amelie—self-consciously create wistfulness they may not warrant. The suggestion that each of these plays is “amazing” relies on us remembering each of them and what, in their respective games, each one meant—whether, for example, that alley-oop to Andrei Kirilenko came late in the fourth quarter with the scored tied or early in the half with Utah up by 20. I’m not a Jazz fan—does such a thing even exist?—so I have no idea.
I watch a lot of basketball and I have to confess that I don’t remember most of the plays in these commercials. Collectively, they feel a bit like a compilation of money shots to the porn enthusiast: glorious moments, for sure, but what about the build-up, where the real drama happens? And even as pure highlights, few strike me as particularly amazing. I see Lebron dunk and Dwayne break ankles and Manu bank lay-ups all the time; without the context to inform these plays, I’m a little lost—blame my ignorance, maybe, or failing mental capacity, but that the NBA is relying on us to imbue these moments with meaning feels not only ostentatious, but counter-intuitive to what really makes playoff basketball so exciting. In the regular season, highlights are fine; but after the 82 are up, it’s all about when the big shots happen—and for that, context is absolutely necessary.
“Remember this?” the WWAHTY? ads seem to demand. “It was important. Remember this.” The whole business smacks of contrivance, but it’s not disingenuous. In fact, nothing could be more revealing and apt than what is articulated through the whole campaign: all of us—the NBA front office and players and coaches and owners and media and fans—want to believe that, with each round of the Playoffs, we are experiencing history.
If we are to believe the marketing campaign that has loomed over and punctuated the past few weeks, we are already living the past: the highlights of the night, the days of our lives, the memories of our future. The NBA isn’t rhetorically asking where amazing will happen; it’s more an open call to players to create moments to be relived, later, in endless replay, and for fans to be ready to acknowledge them. The effect is sort of a living archive, which, at least for me, has been causing some problems, because it’s impossible to figure out what’s genuine.
There was an interesting conversation on this site last year in the wake of the Celtics’ Championship win—and, more so, Kevin Garnett’s. Was his lycanthropic howling— “Anything’s possible!” “I’m certified!” &c.—premeditated, contrived and fake, or was it an authentic expression of emotion? There were arguments; things got heated. Assessing other people’s motivations is always futile, but Garnett was a special case: here was a guy who we’d always believed, whose sincerity was unquestionable, who came correct with the straight real and wept in John Thompson’s lap like a failed son. But, then the made-for-TV moment—and even worse, it felt made-for-replay.
Everything seems to go back to that old Michael Jordan bucket-and-swag—which, keep in mind, but for one savvy cameraman we might have never seen happen. Michael Jordan is history, but also Michael Jordan Is History: his great airy legacy looms over the league and everyone in it. Comparable Greats—Pele, Gretzky—are certainly paragons of individual achievement, yet their shadows don’t loom quite as vastly over soccer and hockey as Mike’s does over the basketball. Maybe it’s because neither has an eponymous “highlight for the ages” that not only defines their careers, but the modern era in their respective sport.
Michael Jordan provides pro ballers more than the archetype for all achievement; he’s created a model for the very idea of legacy—not only in how dominantly you play the game, but how you’re remembered. And having a metonymic, iconic image is imperative to that. So it feels, at least to me, that today’s NBA has created a culture in which players, if they want to be ranked alongside Jordan, or at least recalled in the same breath, need a watershed moment, and they need that moment recorded, and they need that moment replayed—so it’d better be good, and it’d better be theatrical.
It’s the way that this need for performativity manifests in the flow of games that troubles me the most. I shudder at the contrivance of, say, an and-one Lebron James shoulder-shimmy, which seems so concertedly not just mugging for the cameras and fans, but mugging for posterity. And, perhaps most amazingly, that sort of affectedness seems to be trickling down from the league’s top tier to its lesser lights. Even way back in the first round, the unbridled exuberance of a relative nobody like Joakim Noah felt exuberantly put-on. The league needs the wild-looking, sorta foreign youngster with a limited skill-set to have the heart of a hyperactive lion who roars and roars. And Noah—much as I grew to like the guy—seems to recognize that. Good thing we’ve got it on tape!
This sort of cynicism sucks, because I love the Playoffs. I want to believe what I’m seeing is real. But what I don’t want is to have the best moments fed back to me in slo-mo black and white by the league’s marketing department. WWAHTY? replaces the agency of subjective memory with the stagnant banality of fact; it repackages joy as commodity. If they ever were, each of the athletes in those spots is no longer doing anything amazing; they are merely figures in advertisements, reduced to hapless shills. The suggestion seems to be that players who aren’t performing something easily quantifiable as “amazing” will not find their way into a TV spot and, accordingly, will never remembered by anyone.
I think I allowed myself to believe that Michael Jordan kicked Craig Ehlo in the head because back then that sort of bizarre accident actually felt possible—let’s keep things moving and blame pre-adolescent innocence rather than retrospective idealism. But my corrupted memory also makes me think about how excited I’ve gotten when this year’s playoff action has spilled into the unpredictable—Rafer Alston smacking Eddie House on the head, Derek Fisher’s cross-check of Luis Scola—and I feel even sadder. Are eruptions of violence the only time when I let myself feel that I’m not watching programmed automatons, but actual human beings?
Maybe it’s more that I know these are scenes the NBA can’t co-opt, blemishes that the league is in a constant battle to buff and polish out of its pristine product—see the resultant suspensions and ejections. And, when it comes to basketball, I don’t crave or fetishize violence; Vernon Maxwell punching a fan in the face is pretty amazing, in its way, but it’s certainly not a moment in league history that I particularly cherish. No, I just want my memories for myself. And what I don’t want, ever, is to think the stuff I’m playing out in my head (like John Starks’s career-defining dunk on Horace Grant—and MJ, bitch!) is just another commercial.
There’s a weird tension between the celebration I associate with The Shot, which feels absolutely genuine, and the knowledge that I might have never known it happened. In retrospect, it’s more than Michael Jordan’s metamorphosis from showman to winner, but also from man to brand. And while lamenting the commodification of Jordan is a bit like standing in the Ganges and whining that you can’t drink the water, there is still a precious purity to my fantasy about that fabricated replay—after all, Craig Ehlo taking a roundhouse to the temple isn’t the version that’s being played ad infinitum, as a promo for the league.
By now, you should know Joey [classified Jew name]. He writes for FD on occasion, is responsible for the ever-excellent Straight Bangin', and this week was a guest on the FD/DoC podcast. He also really likes The Hills, which figures prominently in a long interview I did with Eugene for his "The People You Don't Know" podcast. It will either make you love or hate me more than ever, or maybe send me sympathy ribbons.
Growing up in a household bereft of prescribed bedtimes or limits on television, and one where knowledge of all kinds remains the leading currency, I developed a “talent” about which most parents wouldn’t normally brag to others. But on more than just a few occasions, my parents would smile with this weird, proud amusement as they told other people that, “Joe stays up so late and likes sports so much that he can watch the same SportsCenter three or four times a day.”
That Joe--he really knows how to use his time well.
My neuroses aside, I summon this memory because it reinforces two related things: 1) I consume a lot of sports media; 2) I still have no clue as to what the NFL Draft is supposed to be about. Every year, I am left feeling the same way--the most misleading weekend in sports is that of the NFL Draft, because, honestly, it seems to be about everything but the actual sport that it nourishes. It strikes me as even more bizarre when it is juxtaposed against the NBA Draft. The NBA Draft is fun. The NFL Draft? Not really. The NBA Draft reflects the fluidity of basketball: point forwards, flex offenses, and “we like his athleticism so we took him.” The NFL Draft, meanwhile, reflects the rigidity of football: set positions, arcane formation rules, and “signability.” To be honest, it sucks.
First, think about the NBA Draft. No, wait. First, let us just get this out of the way: yes, the NBA Draft is an event, or a process, really, riddled with problems. As Hubie might warmly acknowledge, “We know this. OK?” You’re right, teams can make horrible decisions. They seem to emphasize nebulous notions of potential to the preclusion of rational thought. They ignore known entities to roll the proverbial dice on only partially formed athletes who can’t shoot but can move in multiple directions once airborne. They confuse priorities, they overly rely on individual workouts, they insist that kids who don’t care about college attend it for a year--we know all of this. ESPN even has the temerity to post graphics that say things like, “Needs to Improve: Athleticism,” as though you can just buy some at a flea market. The whole thing can lend itself to easy lampoon.
The NBA Draft is undeniably about playing basketball, though, and that redeems it. A sports fan can see this. (A sports fan stupid enough to watch Charley Steiner and Mike Patrick on a loop can see this over and over again.) The way it’s covered, the way it’s structured, the culture that surrounds it--basketball is the thing. More precisely, the focus never moves away from the on-court product, wrongly landing on the draft process, itself. Columnists and reporters frame the draft by highlighting what teams need to improve. There are pre-draft camps where prospects--brace yourselves--play the sport! Teams evaluate their needs and the available talent with immediacy. The idea is usually that the right player can make a meaningful difference, and the priority is finding the best basketball fit. Again, you can fairly criticize how these evaluations are made and where they net out, but it’s hard to impugn the motives behind them. Everything about the draft carries this air of renewal; everything acknowledges that improving the basketball is paramount.
Not unimportant, I should reiterate that the tone of the entire institution is optimistic: from the workouts, to the assessment of needs, to the handshakes with Commissioner Stern, the draft encompasses positivity about the game. Everyone is the next someone, and that someone to whom a given player is compared is rarely any old humdrum player. Parallels are drawn in the sun, with the glow of hope brightening prognostications. Further, front-office personnel, players, and fans are allowed, if not encouraged, to have fun with the whole thing. It is uncommon for a team to draft someone and foster an ensuing dialogue that bemoans how little things will change. There is a baseline understanding that the team is likely to become more competitive, even if a given draft cannot fully satisfy all needs. Enthusiasm is no stranger to the NBA Draft, and no one seems to be bothered by this. Heaven forbid that we enjoy ourselves while celebrating a game.
The NFL draft may be fundamentally about all of this, too. I’ll be fair and allow that this may be the case. Those yahoo Jets fans who show up certainly are into it. Nor will I deny that the denizens of America’s favorite gambling habit surely want to find the safety required to win a Super Bowl and help their fans feel the excitement that should come with successfully executing this search. But…it certainly doesn’t seem that way to an outsider who is very much attuned to sports culture. Instead, everything about the NFL Draft feels different: the way it's discussed, the way it’s administered, the way it’s approached by its participants. In patriotic, nationally aggrandizing Cold War terms, the NBA Draft feels like America--cheerful, excited, warm--while the NFL Draft feels like the Soviet Union--stern, severe, cold. Put another way, which event’s tenor would best accommodate Ronald Reagan eating his jellybeans and smiling with his vacant veneer of senility, and which would better serve Nikita Khrushchev as he pounded his shoe on a desk? That’s what I thought.
Peter King wrote a column this week that captures so many of these differences. Trumpeting that the Detroit Lions, picking first, will focus on "signability" when making their choice next weekend, King easily rattles off 1,000 words about how the Lions will sort out whom they draft. It’s Peter King, so it’s overly moralistic and very much written by a middle-aged white guy from New Jersey knowledgeable NFL writing, but, strikingly, it has so little to do with football. Instead, it’s about business strategy; it’s about what the Lions are supposed to pay a top pick; it’s about a historical analysis of “what happens in the draft,” so to speak. King’s story presumes a certain kind of draft formalism that not only shifts its natural focus--shouldn’t it be about improving how the Lions play football?--but also illustrates what the NFL Draft is really about, namely the theater of “playing draft.” Football is almost secondary, and that’s neither fun nor sports, really.
Before we go on, I’ll again attempt to be fair: Maybe another team coming off a historic failure wouldn’t focus on “signability,” and instead would try to get the single best player. This could be a problem with the Lions (entirely possible), and not with the NFL. Further, the NBA doesn’t contend with signing drama because it has a rookie salary cap, so this could be an apples-to-oranges comparison. However, the NFL salary structure is fairly rigid, albeit non-codified, and the variations from year to year are not so vast. Were they, professional draft blowhards like Mel Kiper, Jr.--something else that, thankfully, sets the NBA and NFL apart--couldn’t shriek with such certainty about which players deserve “fourth-pick money” and which picks are good values. It wouldn’t make sense if everyone didn’t already know the stakes.
You can likely sense my skepticism that the absent rookie salary cap is the dispositive issue that separates the NFL Draft from its NBA superior. I am similarly skeptical (read: convinced in the opposite) that only the Lions would be choosing a top pick using actuary tables because, well, we go through this every year. It’s seemingly always about factors that are not directly connected to who runs faster, hits harder, and, ultimately, wins more. I don’t suggest that NFL teams don’t want to play better football. Rather, I’d argue that this unavoidable imperative, somehow, gets lost in the draft process itself. Not really a “sports” weekend, the NFL Draft has taken on this weird, meta component that seems to fuck up the thinking and the dialogue. The football draft is treated like a series of business transactions, and teams appear to lose sight of just picking the players who will make them best at playing football. NFL teams come off as more preoccupied with "drafting the right way," or carrying out some process preserved for its own sake, rather than the foundational issue of just improving the team. (For now, we’ll leave aside the much, much larger conversation about sports as business, which I acknowledge renders this post an incomplete exploration. I am OK with that.)
That’s not fun. Nothing about this ritualism is fun. It’s weird, and frankly annoying, that as early as February, people seriously argue about who the Seahawks should draft. Similarly, there is something nonsensical and antiseptic about the premier pre-draft event comprising Wonderlic tests, World’s Strongest Man simulations, and seemingly everything but actually playing football. The entire ordeal--and that’s what it is--feels insincere and disconnected from the sport.
Instead, the NFL Draft, not in organic harmony with the sport itself, seems to most directly connect to the larger NFL Industrial Complex that enjoys a suffocatingly tight grip on America. Everything about the NFL is taken oh so seriously, and discussed with such synthetic urgency and significance, that actual football is almost a secondary concern. Violence and primal physical competition may forever hold sway over the imagination of humanity, resulting in an evergreen appeal for the sport, but the Business of the NFL obscures this simple, innate appeal. It’s like when you apply too much dressing and drown out the natural flavors originally meant to be enhanced. Far from a compulsory exercise meant to showcase the product, improve how it’s played, and preserve the latent appeal of sport--a description which I’d ascribe to the NBA Draft as a compliment--the NFL Draft is its own industry, in effect. The draft is just about the NFL--the crest, those beer commercials, all that tailgating, and everything else that was once an attendant circumstance and now an equal to the football.
That is not really sports. That is marketing, or popular culture, even. The Masters, the Final Four, the divisional football playoff games--those are sports weekends. Those are mirthful, exciting opportunities to celebrate sports. As is the NBA Draft, a process that never loses sight of basketball, of the NBA’s loose rhythm, or the hope of the offseason. The NFL Draft, on the other hand, is an event that’s not really about sports. It’s about itself, and the self-involved seriousness of the NFL. Football becomes almost incidental as the NFL Draft drones on, polluting a perfectly innocent spring weekend with consternation about tenths-of-a-second differences, stern treatment of depth chart minutiae, and self-righteous indignation arising when teams “get it wrong.” As though the goal is to draft a certain way, not win more games.
Go to the bright, shiny, new store, cop this shirt, go to a Warriors game, and maybe S-Jax's friends will ask you to pose for a picture with the man himself. That's what happened to reader DR, who was gracious enough to send along the photographic evidence.
And really, seriously. No comments about Ray Allen's suggestion that Bron get political, or my reaction to it? It says there's a post underneath all the announcements.
I now write with the disclaimer that I may no longer know what the f I'm talking about. I've been in a post-Al Jefferson knee injury daze for the past few weeks, and then with the news that Amare is out for the postseason, I almost just gave up. Instead, I've been watching all of the games without the sound on, and I actually cannot understand what is going on. As soon as I started watching the games on mute, LeBron seemed like way more of the MVP than Kobe, the Spurs look outstanding, and I am now on the verge of liking Dwyane Wade,
Now Imagine my confusion when I was watching the Wolves game and they flashed the faces, four in a row, of Antawn Jamison, OJ Mayo, David Lee, and Emeka Okafor. What could those four possibly have in common? Turns out it was one of those promos for fans to buy tickets for the upcoming next four games at home: Washington, Memphis, New York, and Charlotte. Depressing for sure.
Yes, enough has been made of the fact that Bynum's out, KG and a ton of Celtics are out, Al Jeff's out, Amare's out, Gilbert is still out, Iverson is teetering, T-Mac is out, most of the Bucks are out, Oden is out, and now Rudy Fernandez but let me make more out of it. We are entering into a swaggerless vortex that might extend into the postseason. Already, I don't want to see the Suns win it simply because it won't "count." Same goes for Rockets if T-Mac isn't there (yes, I know), and that goes double for Portland if Oden and/or Rudy aren't in the mix.
And if KG isn't at full speed, would a Cavaliers or Magic title count? And if the Spurs beat the Suns again, it certainly wouldn't have the same significance as it would if Amare was on the court. Remember those jokes about how the Rockets' mid-90s titles didn't count because Jordan "loaned" them the trophy? I'm starting to get that itchy feeling again.
Right now, the only teams I can fully get behind winning the whole thing is the Denver Nuggets and the NO Hornets (and on a good day, the Jazz). The Nuggets and Hornets aren't expected to beat anyone in the playoffs even an Amare-less Suns. They both have guys in Melo and CP3 who are more deserving of titles than anyone I can think of. Their teams are in tact. Their coaches' futures depend on their success this season. And they dunk a lot.
With a month left in the regular season, I thought I'd have more than that to cheer about. Please give me some other good news, if anyone cares to.
New Shoals Unlimited, on the subject of the NBA Financial Apocalypse in its form most pure. Oh, and as I try to figure out this new revenue streams thing, I may go a little heavy-handed at times. Like reminding you that it's decidedly un-weird to own the FreeDarko tote bag, or linking to commercial pages from out of posts. . . remember, I want to admit all this up-front so we trust each other.
In the latest ESPN mag, Bill Simmons eats breakfast with Baron Davis and tries to get to the heart of what's eating the former pride of the Warriors. For one, it's Simmons giving a fuck, which is to say, reminding us why he's so beloved and feared as a basketball writer [insert Freudian father figure, anxiety of influence tangent here]. But there's one truly unprecedented moment where, to paraphrase, Bill and Baron discuss Davis's lack of vitality on the court, conclude that it has to do with a lack of inspiration, and decide he needs to channel the "Boom-Dizzle" demi-god that rose out of the 2006-07 Warriors campaign.
Let's rewind that one, in case you missed how many fourth walls got violated therein: Davis opens up to a member of the media as if Simmons were there to help, a valued consultant instead of a thorn in his side. Then, he welcomes advice about his attitude on the court, even though the Sports Guy is not one of those wise ex-jocks who occasionally—and with great public fanfare—send messages to current players. To top it all off, or come full-circle, Simmons drifts over to the realm of fandom, drawing on his non-expert expertise to offer up a solution. Journalist and athlete meet in the middle, only to retreat to their respective sides of a gulf exactly because it's the source of the power, the mystique, that allowed Davis to thrive in the Bay. In short, it's Davis admitting that some of his swagger comes from a larger-than-life self that's both reinforced and reinvented by adoring fans. You can also imagine a more cynical version that involves sneaker companies and marketing entities.
In a way, this makes me understand why some people think Simmons is the only person alive who could realistically write another Breaks of the Game, likely the finest basketball book ever written. But this being a very different era, this new Breaks wouldn't just be expert reportage with an ear for the novelistic. Instead, it would go deep into one of Halberstam's recurring themes: what players mean to fans, or cities as a whole, and what impact this has on the actual person inside the jersey. Except, in a turn so benignly postmodern that I am contractually bound to type "postmodern," Simmons's authority comes from his willingness to intelligently embrace this fan-tastic aspect of the athlete. That, above all else, is how he's influenced FD.
However, instead of the players in Breaks of the Game, who come off as either staunch professionals troubled by this unpredictable realm of meaning, or egomaniacs who refuse to acknowledge what really fuels their stardom, you get today's NBA players. Davis may be exceptionally self-aware, but it's worth noting that popular players drowning in love feel it, feed off of it, and reflect it in their play. The concern isn't over why the public can't see them for who they are—either they could care less about everyone seeing "the real me", or such a thing no longer exists—it's about getting back to that place where they felt best and played like it. That's got everything to do with a version of themselves that has everything to do with perception, or consulting an expert on attitudes in the stands. Simmons remains the foremost chronicler of these voices, and if you want to understand why blogs matter, it's because—no matter how crappy they're treated by the league—fans matter like never before.
