I don't like what I'm hearing. Not from LeBron, who has boldly asserted that he could win the scoring title every year, but from the rest of us. No, it's not the case that any other player could top LeBron if both gunned all-out, Gervin/Thompson-style, each day of the night. You know why? Because unlike Durant or Melo, James has way more at his disposal. He could work the post, or just run up the court and through all defenders on every possession. Yes, it was a matter-of-fact statement, calm and hardly with the lurch of a braggart. At the same time, LeBron is differentiating himself from his peers. Hey, everybody, he has untapped potential still. He knows it, and if he totally broke out of a team system to go for numbers—which, incidentally, he is less likely to do than anyone on this short-list—amazing thing would happen. We used to know it, and now he's slipping it in himself. Going after him for it seems a waste of time, but at the same time, there is something chilling about this off-hand press release. Forget at your own peril.
I am about to say two things involving NBC's Pro Basketball Talk, both of which involve folks I consider e-pals. So no one think this is a mix-tape war. Kurt lead the "is this news?" charge on the LeBron front; to him, I say yes and no. In what order, I'm not sure. No, in that we should knew, but yes, in that he reminds us? Or yes, in that it he reminds us (and himself) what's still buried inside him, and no, after that it's a no-brainer. Let's move on. Krolik, whom some of you may remember from his contributions to this site, took poor Monta Ellis to task the same day for calling himself the third-best player in the league. First, I would like to thank John for bringing to my attention Rolling Stone's embrace of Durant. Of course, it all makes sense—KD, and the Thunder in general, are the most indie rock-friendly team in the league. They even took that from the Sonics' storied past. El ouch. As for the meat of the story, look, shouldn't Ellis be ignored even more forcefully than James? Let him have his fun. If you think he's the problem with the Warriors, you must have an undue amount of faith in the D-League.
Ellis isn't perfect, and his career is at loggerheads. But if an obviously talented, frustrated, and aimless still-young guard on a team built out of nonsense brags to a generally indifferent media, is he really going to war? Not to neglect my role as a member of the media, but come on, let's give Ellis a break. At least until we're all convinced that he's being given a chance to screw up convincingly. Neither his non "right way" play (either caps or quotations all the time, I thought), nor his inflated ego are tethered to reality. I don't know, maybe I'm underestimating all these call-ups. But this is a man floating through trauma. Do we really want to hold him accountable in the same way—even less so, maybe—than the game's best player? Ellis may deserve more grief than James, and is certainly empirically wrong in a slew of ways, but it's only LeBron James whose words have any meaning past the narrow context of "punk spews crap" headline.
We’ve been doing an awful lot of talking about talking lately; there are so many voices in my head Syd Barrett would feel right at home pulling up a beanbag chair and taking up residence in my frontal lobe. I’ll spare everyone the Gilbert allusions and the theory that Brandon Jennings had this whole new digital age thing all figured out and was in a position to be the first player to create his iconography without the assistance of the traditional press until he fell out of love with Twitter again. It’s a reminder that mastery over a medium that allows such open discourse is like trying to control air. Maybe some day. Dude’s still 19 years old and trying to work it out just like the rest of us, or maybe he's a step or two ahead and already on to the next thing.
Point is, almost everyone talks in the NBA and in many cases the why is more interesting than the actual conversation. Some use communication to build their profile, a la Gil and Brandon, while others speak only out of necessity. This isn't a star/grunt construct either. Several elite players have deepened their allure by being distant and mysterious, if not moody (Tim Duncan, Kevin Garnett), and just as many journeymen have enhanced their careers by simply being good talkers. The vast majority is made up of players that range from nondescript to noble depending on their substance. Steve Nash, who has assumed a Bono-like role as the collective conscious of the league outside the context of the court, is an example of the latter.
Then there is Rasheed Wallace, who is one of the rare few whose words are as compelling as his motivation for speaking them. It received little play at the time, but Wallace essentially challenged the entire ecosystem of the NBA back in November. Long story short, Sheed remains convinced that Tim Dongahy wasn’t the only ref in on the con. Others have expressed doubt about the official version of events, but none have gone on the attack and with such complete matter-of-factness as Wallace. What takes this beyond the realm of outrageous outspokenness and into the realm of subtle genius is his rationale. In an interview he gave to the Boston Herald some weeks back, Wallace said, essentially: I’ll say whatever it is I want to say, cause fuck it, I can.
The money quote:
“You know, I say what’s on my mind, speaking my freedom, and I get fined for it. It’s a catch-22 with that (expletive), man. See, they think they can control people with money. Everybody don’t live like that.”
Sheed's invoking a blend of libertarianism mixed with some Marxian distrust of authoritarian institutions, common stuff to any third-year anarchist at Antioch, but by the conventions of the NBA, this is some revolutionary shit. It's tempting, then, to see Wallace as a political figure speaking truth to power, but that's not quite right because for all his bombast, he is essentially apolitical. For a politician there has to be some kind of rational benefit to challenging the status quo. Be it for power, a genuine desire to affect some kind of real change, or even megalomania, there’s a method behind it all. (Michael Steele may be the exception here). Wallace, however, seems far too cynical, or maybe wise, to believe that his words will ever resonate beyond that day’s news cycle.
He's not selling anything, not even his ideas. He has nothing to gain, and apparently also nothing to lose. If he’s right about everything he’ll shrug and go back to jacking 3’s. If he’s wrong, he’ll probably do the same. Either way he’s getting T’d up at the first sign of trouble. There is no end game here. This has caused some in Boston to question his sanity, if not his motives, but that’s the wrong read because he doesn’t seem to have one. A motive that is, beyond a strict moral code of the court that belongs to him alone.
Wallace leaves it up to everyone else to figure it out for themselves and for the scattered believers, Sheed is the true NBA iconoclast, questioning the league at every turn and referring to LeBron as The Golden Child. (Also Hedo Turkoglu as Turkododo. Nobody ever said he wasn’t funny as hell when he wants to be).
Quoting Mencken: “The iconoclast proves enough when he proves by his blasphemy that this or that idol is defectively convincing – that at least one visitor to the shrine is left full of doubts. The liberation of the human mind has been best furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving to all men that doubt; after all was safe – that the god in the sanctuary was a fraud.”
It struck me as odd that David Stern would fine Wallace for criticizing officials, while allowing him to question the Donaghy madness without sanction. But by doing so, Stern would have inadvertently given credence to Sheed’s theories and opened them up to scrutiny, and by letting it go Stern relegates him to the role of the solitary man in the town square squawking about end times. He is easily dismissed, even banished from the realm.
But Sheed is not Sisyphus. He is not a prisoner of his rhetoric, and in fact, he has very little stake in the outcome. His latest contract will probably be his last and it’s not like he’s auditioning to replace Barkley on TNT. The truth about Donaghy, et al., will come out eventually. It almost always does and it might wind up setting some people free. But not Sheed. He’s already there, secure in his beliefs and without fear of real reprisal.
The problem with trying to write about my old-new (or is it new-old?) gig at FanHouse? All that comes to mind is cliches, which even when damaged remain cliches. They say you can't go home again, but you can. They say they never really miss you till you're dead or you're gone. Yet cliches, and their bastard derivatives, are true for a reason. So, as they say in Spartacus, it's huntin' time!!!!
I started my professional blogging career at AOL back in 2006, which was also when the sky opened up and this started to look like a viable career for many of us. We were are so young then. That's when I got to know Ziller, Skeets, Matt Watson, Alana G, Nate Jones, and a slew of other talented folks who were part of that early operation, helmed by the indomitable Jamie Mottram. But it was fun like the gold rush was fun, which meant we also worked hard, dealt with growing pains–ours, AOL's, the field's—and drove ourselves into the ground. I bled and cried as much as anyone, which is a weird thought if you know me. So eventually I left for cushier pastures, like when everyone on Deadwood keeps threatening to go back East and take a bath.
As time went by, though, I saw my old friends rise in the ranks. I saw bloggers get the respect they deserved. I saw FanHouse look less like a free-for-all, and more like a German automobile, which I'm pretty sure ruins my Deadwood analogy. And so, after two years away, I'm back starting today. I'll still be a little less nuts than on FD, but they want me for me. I'm reunited with Tom, which means more far-out infographics. Matt's now my boss, but refuses to let me call him "Sir Watson" or "Mr. Livingston". It's good to be back working with the likes of Brett and Nate, as well as folks like Rob Peterson and Matt Moore whom I met in the interim. Producer Randy Kim is someone I share some real world, non-hoops friends with. Ain't that a sign.
Speaking of change, let it be known that Eric Freeman, a.k.a. Ty Keenan, is taking over The Baseline. I think he sent an email to some press people entitled "FreeDarko Sleeper Cell Emerges at Sporting News." This post on first coaching jobs is an early favorite of mine.
He wanted me to call this announcement "Tell your God to be ready for blood," but that was scary. So I've opted for a straightforward title, and this Robert John Wilkins/Rolling Stones quote for the close: "Kill that calf and call the family round/my son was lost but now he is found/'cause that's the way for us to get along". You were just spared a Fat Joe clip, so be thankful and get pumped!!!!!!
All I've ever really wanted to say all along about Gil, in column form: sports aren't morality. If you look to them for that, you're shallow and confused.
I never thought I'd get a chance to experience Tiger Woods, or Brett Favre, but here I am. As best as I can tell, NBA blogging exists at this point to type, all drivel-like, about whatever someone told someone else in the last hour. Good thing I am busy with the book. However, one thing's clear: There's a lot of bullshit in the air, of the worst, inflammatory kind. And once that stuff is said, there's no going back. No correction ever really repairs things. The process by which a celebrity beats back initial false reports is almost as fascinating as it is sickening. And as I've said, some public figures simply lack the clout to move past it.
I come here not to blindly defend Arenas, or offer explanations as I did when Delonte rolled around strapped. I still don't know, any better than you or the constantly updated news stories do, what happened and how it interfaces with the law. But a lot of the reporting here, and blog dissemination of it, is straight out of last summer's campaign. I know, Sharpton's contrasting the arena Obama watches games at with steel in the locker room. And yet isn't this "where there's smoke, there's outrage" b/w "there's always next hour's web update to clean things up" approach to news exactly what allowed the right to get traction with stupid shit throughout the campaign?
But in a lot of ways, this is even worse. Dear everyone, do you remember who broke the John Woo-ready version of the story? Peter Vecsey. Along with Sam Smith, he's pretty much the one reporter whose rumors you might as well write the opposite of and go from there. Now in this case, he did have a kernel of truth in what he wrote. Yet he wrapped it up in every conceivable layer of sensationalism, and continues to even in the thrice-scrubbed-over version of the story that sits on the Post's site now.
(Lang reminded me that Gil pointed out that one of Vecsey's original sources was a street ball player. Appropriate, seeing as Vecsey's the And1 of NBA reportage.)
Vecsey unleashed a scene right out of the old cowboy Pacers, Yahoo! actually came first, but theirs was much more solidly on the back of previous reports about the investigation. And from there, all hell broke loose. We built this city on Peter Vecsey; Yahoo!'s far more responsible report inadvertently added fuel to the fire. It was a classic example of going for broke with the news micro-cycle—and, if anyone cares, setting up readers of print dailies to be completely misinformed for days on end.
Have I brought up Vecsey enough? Anyone remember when he claimed Josh Smith and Zaza were fightin' with fists in their locker room, and then had Smith attacking bouncers? These were major blows against a young player teetering between "future star" and "head case." Then, lo and behold, AJC beat writer supreme Sekou Smith—who was there—set the record straight. Read the whole link, but the gist: Peter Vecsey is a snake who makes shit up for tabloid reasons. Anyone who doesn't conduct themselves with this fact in mind is no better than him.
Now I'm just getting angry, which is when I'm at my least beautiful. Suffice it to say that I also find it odd how conveniently Gil's "moral turpitude" fits in with the Wizards long-term business interests. As was Monta's with the Warriors. So in conclusion, this would be a good moment for us all to learn to take a deep breath, not listen to false prophets, and realize that like it or not, sometimes these things take time. Otherwise, you might as well believe message boards. Those shits get updates like every five seconds!
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.
Consider it a podcast round-up. First, Joey Litman joins Dan to talk about the NBA, which for them means wailing about the Knicks and clinging to each other like it's 2012, not 2010. Good stuff.
Then, a recap of the only partly-staged feud between DoC and Dan Levy, step-by-step:
"Losing Out" - Black Milk "White Elephant" - Volcano Suns "You in Color" - The Black Angels "The Color of Tempo" - Prefuse 73 "House of Flying Daggers" - Raekwon
Shut up and enjoy your weekend.
P.S. Contest closed, winner decided, he will speak once we work out some security clearance issues.
I highly suggest you turn your eyes to this lengthy post by Vince Grzegorek of Cleveland Scene, on the touchy subject of how the fuck a beat writer covers Delonte West. Vince and I had talked about this a few times prior; he felt the team was trying to make like this was a non-issue, and had decided, for political reasons, to pretend this wasn't an incredibly important topic to pursue. But then he changed his mind, got some quotes, and has started the conversation.
To me, the tricky part is that West's is a medical situation that can't be discussed, for fear of aggravating it. It would be like if asking a guy about his back sent shooting pains up and down it. Hopefully, at some point that won't be the case. But then what? Can West ever be asked about his brain, or is that the equivalent of trying to take a photo of a healing knee with a bunch of rocks? And do we attribute anything that goes wrong with him, on or off the court, to some sort of relapse? Over at my other place of employment, some asshole commenter lit into the BREAKING item about Delonte's charges with the typical "millionaires shouldn't complain stupid thug excuses". That's part of why I'd prefer to broach these issues on FD, but at the same time, can we ever blame West again (say, in the airport incident), or assign him typical human responsibility? If not,that would suck for both those out to skewer athletes and for the man himself. Does this mean the media has to giggle nervously whenever West says anything the least bit odd or funny?
Also, off of Vince's piece, there's the question of covering sports vs. covering the person. We saw this already with Kobe's trial. It's hard to tell exactly where the line is between "this guy affects the team" and "this guy has a mess of other stuff going on." I wonder, though, why this is suddenly such a problem, when the press routinely doesn't ask athletes shit about their personal life, and keeps plenty of skeletons in the closet. I think it has to do less with the weapons incident than the fact that, presumably, West's issues enter the exact space at which he interacts with the media. This story is as much about the media, their individual relationships with West, and the awkward position both parties are in, as "how to objectively cover an athlete." The arrests are off-court, and we know how to deal with those; basketball-wise, he's just fine. It's really a matter of everyone learning to trust each other, of finding a comfort zone where learning to read Delonte, and being polite, tactful, or tolerant, eventually leads to him fitting into coverage in a logical way. The same way you walk around a seven-foot guy who's always stretching out his bum knee in the middle of the locker room.
Addendum: When I ran this by Vince, he raised the further point of "the team dealing with someone who they very well probably don't want speaking on the record in front of microphones right now." Which, if you think about it, might explain why West was held out of preseason games.
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.
Very special episode of FDPDOCNBAP here, as Dan and Ken seek refuge from the NBA dog days by chopping it up with Bomani Jones on those intertwined subjects of sports, race, media. You know, that easy stuff that total strangers always get together to discuss over Skype. Thanks to Bomani for coming on—I sat this one out mostly because I just wanted to sit back and listen to the finished product.
Music:
"Loving" — William Shatner and Ben Folds "Pot Kettle Black" — Wilco "Will It Go Round in Circles?" — Billy Preston
So that's how I found myself in the position of reputationally damaging one of my favorite players.
On Saturday, when the sun should've been setting and I should've been buying chicken broth, I ended up having an impassioned phone conversation with Chris Littmann over those Jennings/Budden tapes. I hadn't taped them off the original camera feed, or put them on message boards, hip-hip with a trace of Knicks, in the first place. But we were in a position to, as the kids say, blow up his spot in a major way. The question was, how to do so without coming over as prudish, judgmental asses who don't actually like getting to hear players really, truly be themselves.
I think we—well, actually, Chris—did a good job softening, or ambiguifying, the blow. But the fact remains: The Baseline, formerly known as the mainstream media outlet most devoted to Jennings cheerleading (and Rubio-hating), was now spearheading the movement to get out some quotes that, in the hands of the stupid, would further tarnish Jennings's already tricky image. In the past, I'd resisted putting up incriminating Twits, Here, though, I thought of throwing these videos up on FD before the whole prospect of going platinum with them came up. For anyone with half a brain, or half a clue as to how NBA players—especially an outspoken nut like Jennings—would talk in a "safe" situation, these are gold.
Are there people too foolish, or walled-in, to not catch the obviously whiff of absurdity and playfulness in everything Jennings says here? Of course. Should I spend my whole journalistic life dancing around these assholes with kid feet? I don't want to. To me, Jennings follows naturally from Beasley or Arenas, both of whom are distant descendents of Muhammad Ali. They talk. We listen. They do or don't back it up. But we listen because we know they might.
The reason we ultimately went big-time with the story was the abrupt cover-up/misunderstanding/Twitter shutdown surrounding it. As Chris said in his post, we like seeing this side of players. But it's not clear the players themselves have really thought this "people want to see the real me" thing through all that well. Most importantly, are they supposed to be showing us the edgy outskirts of their public persona, or the first shores of who they really are? That is, are Twitter, or presumably ephemeral, semi-private (if you don't know. . . ) camera feeds, meant for the hardcore fans who just want more, more, more content, and will tolerate some rough edges—or those so in tune with the player that they actually "get" them?
It's clear that ballers understand the marketing potential of Twitter, and recognize the authenticity factor contained therein. But again, are they supposed to just do them, and let the interested public see a little, or learn a whole new set of rules for how to reveal layers of their persona that are off-limits in press conferences without having to stage a Cultural Translation 101 seminar on the internet? Check out the Wade Twits in the Baseline post. Hard to see these utterances as anything other than Wade ignoring the public, or figuring anyone watching his Twitter exists in some sort of idealized fan vacuum. Either way, the question of audience, and public presentation, has gone out the window. That must be liberating—not just to get to say whatever, but to know there's an audience for it. But exactly waht "say anything" means remains to be seen.
As we can see from the deletion of Jennings's Twitter, it's not like agents know exactly how to deal with this newfound questions of real/too real. By its very nature, athlete social media should push the envelope a little. Remember Arenas's blog, anyone? However, that was far more mediated, vetted, and no matter how renegage it seemed at the time, a so-called "underground" version of the Arenas emerging in the press. What Jennings or Wade is saying here is irreconcilable with their mainstream personas. It forces us to acknowledge who these players might really be—a "real" that's only terrifying if you're incapable of reading "fuck the Knicks" as anything other than an off-hand joke.
So consider this a challenge not to players, but to fans, the media, and agencies. These guys want to put themselves out there. Clearly, it's seen as an opportunity for them to be themselves, in a way that the strictures of modern marketing doesn't allow for. How to reconcile this behavior with the vanilla image that moves real money? Where's the ledge? Amidst all the juvenile finger-wagging that will spring up around these Jennings comments, I want to know what's next: What happens to those of us who want to hear raw and uncut Brandon?
LIke I said after these broke, if only Jennings had cleaned up his language a little bit, this could've been viral gold and an absolute marketing coup if the plan is to sell his Hollywood persona as something for the next generation. As it is, we're plunged right back into some of the most tired culture wars, or even clash of basketball civilizations. When that clucking clears away, though, it's up to young players and their management to figure out the new rules for unfiltered interaction with their public. At least that way, maybe the rest of the world can learn the difference between Jennings acting out and the rookie PG really sowing the seeds of discontent.
Post-script worth noting: It appears (from what we're hearing) that Brandon himself pulled the Twitter page. Maybe it was reactionary, preparing for the worst from all other parties involved. But certainly, this indicates that even this most "naive" of social media doyens realizes he needs to regroup and figure out what balance to strike.
(Working slowly toward a Suns post. Maybe we'll wait to see if it actually goes down.)
This reminds of a Painted Area post that boldly and matter-of-factly declared Jennings the third-best prospect in the draft. This was based on actual observation, whereas everyone else was going on murky deductions about what Euro stats did or didn't mean, or a handful or anecdotal reports that trickled in from interested parties.
After watching this Rome-only Jennings mix, I see why he came to this conclusion. So maybe his stats had holes; aren't they supposed to? And I know the whole growth narrative matters, but it's too hazy to hang a multi-million dollar investment on. These clips make it pretty darn clear that Jennings wasn't stumbling through a foreign system. He's making plays here that evince exactly the same flamboyant, near-absurd, virtuosity—that I'm convinced is totally self-aware—but not in any way wrecking the integrity of his role. This is what Jennings more than Young Marbury 2. He's both more and less that cosmic force, Iverson's Zoroasterian battle within reconciled as a multi-national.
And about BwB . . . I can't really add much to the zillion recaps that have already been written. It was great to meet a bunch of people I've emailed with, and—gasp—in some cases, make the acquaintance of some folks with whom I'd had zero blog interaction. The HHR crew deserve oodles of credit to pulling together and pulling off an event that kept changing and evolving. GQ's party was fun, and I hate parties. I'm not even mad at y'all for spreading petty rumors about my love for Ricky Rubio!
I know my panel was crazy and all, and did produce this lasting tribute to how loathsome and noisy I am, but I think one key thing got lost in there, and in the conference as a whole. Yes, in part I wanted to question the whole blog/MSM blood-feud, and wonder why exactly newspaper men and bloggers had convinced themselves it was 1917 Russia all over again. Bloggers are not inherently noble, or part of some movement that will carry us all to heaven; established writers should not think the sky is falling, or that all's relative and everyone has voice, because people just aren't that stupid; the Ibanez saga says to me that treading lightly when it comes to steroids is impossible, so if you want to be taken seriously and not just be seen as a cranky fan, you should be ready to dig in your heels and pound the pavement!!! And yes, I probably cursed out all bloggers and journalists who can't write well, or report well when they have to. Merit is not dead, it just got less exclusive.
But what I really want to get out there was how little print media other than newspapers were discussed. Newspapers are in trouble, and have been for some time, which kind of makes them an easy target, like the steroids of media upheaval. However, yours truly has always been most interested in magazines and books. Jeff Pearlman at one point said that books were now his medium of choice. Other than that, nothing. I know that all publishing is a mess right now, but I felt a little out of place when the main issues were 1) learning how to ball out like Jason McIntyre 2) getting hired to kill off beat writers.
I don't see why at least magazines can't figure prominently into this discussion. After all, if you want to make a living writing, they're still a decent source of (intermittent, supplementary) income. And it's kind of insulting to bloggers to assume that, while they can move in on one quadrant of print media, they're somehow barred from making the same kind of transition that so many "real journalistz" have made. That's the blog ghetto all over again.
And anyone who doesn't think it should be a global priority for Spencer Hall to get a book out there soon is not a part of the same "movement" as me.
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.
By now, you might have already seen the fruits of FD's collaboration with adidas. If not, behold:
I also want to direct your attention to a couple TOTALLY FD columns I wrote yesterday for The Baseline:
-This Gund/Gray/Bron incident was so shriekingly literary, I nearly considered pitching it like I was a real writer.
-I still agree with this assessment of what Kobe/Melo means, even if last night's game hardly followed the script. That was the most graceful, morally permissible, battle of the titans you could get in the NBA. Also, that game struck me as part-NCAA, part-pros. Don't ask me where that intuition comes from.
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.
MORE MORE MORE
-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?
