Spectacle has no angle, no perspective. It is horror without intent, intent without horror; it fuses the two poles of aesthetics and outcome as if there had never been an need to reconcile them. There is now a complete circle where before we had long chains of dialectics, writhing between extremes more friendly than they knew. Gone is the case-by-case nature, which required the utmost level of devotion -- either an intuitive crackle, or monastic grind. War's finery and brutality were historically used in the West to mask and enrich one another. Then in the modern age, war-as-spectacle turned power into art, and art into an expression of power. It's fascism, but it's also every single terrorist organization that garnered street cred with kids in the latest digs.
And yes, spectacle is the place where war bleeds into sport without the least bit of room for resistance.
Did you hear the one about last night's TNT line-up. Coming into this season -- as far back as Hoop Summit 2009, actually -- I had expected Wall to not only wow us all with highlights, but rip through the fabric of the game. Some players expand possibilities; others leave categories in liquid ruin. Wall struck me as the kind who lashes out at what we know as if each play were his opening salvo. LeBron James is his own canon; the young Kevin Garnett had a gate-crashing spirit fit for the maddest explorer or most abstract scientist. Wall, though, would make his mark through spectacle, aggressive gestures that left you stunned, and altered the game, while leaving little trace of where they came from or how they might happen again. I still have that hope for Wall, but the newfound importance of the NBA point guard is, in some ways, a burden. The quarterback analogy, along with the learning curve that position demands, is relevant like never before. Structure isn't orthodoxy -- if anything, it's a chance for grander subversion. And yet it's a different kind of engagement.
Wall can still disrupt our basketball brains, and yet to really come into his own, he must expand this sensibility to an entire unit. Impossible? Who knows. Paul is a mastermind, Rondo an eccentric, Nash a trickster. Jazz fans, stick your Deron Williams line here. None of them had Wall's smoldering message, and yet each has consistently found a way to lead their troops not only toward the basket, but to send them scurrying with style -- an extension of themselves. There simply is no other position that offers this possibility, to transmute the quirks of one's game into something resembling a community. There is something cult-ish about it. These things don't end well in the real world. Especially when, in the thick of it, you find a player like Wall -- who, by definition, is at his best when he overrides what we thought we knew. I have no idea what a team premised on this kind of gesture means, and if "prophetic" is even the right word. Do prophets cause problems, or do they teach us anew? Saying "both" seems both unreasonable, presumptuous, and something only yours truly on the sidelines of both basketball and belief would ever tell you. I do know, though, that JaVale McGee figures prominently is that as-of-yet unknown future.
Blake Griffin doesn't have these problems. In part, it's because a vaguely-defined "big man", a giant entrusted merely with making life difficult, even harrowing, for other tall people or smaller ones who would come near the basket. The center has dissolved, and we are left with the "big man". Garnett may have started it, but don't disregard Tim Duncan's unwillingness to play, or be defined as, a five. Or everyone's refusal to be listed as 7'. What's left for Griffin, then, is a space blank, raw, and undefined. He has answered with the ultimate in basketball-as-spectacle. We can attempt to talk about him rationally -- how his combination of power, skill, strength, precision, speed, athleticism, and zeal is fairly unprecedented (LeBron doesn't use his size like this, nor is he as big). I could post some videos to remind you of his greatest hits. Yet Griffin's every move contains within it a shard of his genius. That's the definition of style, and yet in this case, the way that dominance is etched. When we lose this distinction, totalizing occur and spectacle overtakes us. Nothing is frivolous, or entertaining without suggesting a trail of wreckage and damnation left huddled in the corner. The chills Griffin gives us may be degree of difficulty, or because he makes it look so easy. Technology and culture hate each other most when they stare out from the same eyes.
From a fan's perspective, Blake Griffin is one of the most amazing athletes I have ever watched, as well as one of the most frightening. It is these same qualities that also likely make him one of the best. I said last night that Griffin is this NBA season's sole must-watch. Why? Pumped-up excerpts don't do him justice, and neither does the removed act of "having the game on". Griffin plays a different sport than everyone else. Wall would swoop in and scramble expectations. Griffin simply ignores that there was anything there before or since, or that showmanship and brute effectiveness need, for practical purposes, go their separate ways in a blink. His method isn't expert chaos, but a space-aged roar that makes you shout out in joy and pain at once -- at both the "how" and the "what".
This is the heart of spectacle, and when you're sucked in, you can't tell which way is up and which is down. It is the end and the beginning, for the game and for the way we parse it. Sometimes, I'm not even sure whether I'm supposed to love or hate him. Once upon a time, man discovered fire. According to the Greeks, Prometheus paid a price, but for an adjective like that, I would give my liver to a buzzard who knew more than I did.
Anyone who owns FD Book #2 knows how much we love Walt Frazier's Rockin' Steady, which as it just so happens, was reissued by Triumph Books this fall. COP THAT. There is so much to say about Clyde's opus that I can't possible do it justice at the moment ... so how about watching the Knicks legend be interviewed by Don Imus yesterday about a truly indescribable cultural artifact that he and Ira Berkow created way back in 1974. Huh?
I think this segment comes first but it starts with an ad and I wasn't having that.
Eric Freeman: Harrison Barnes even wears a dull number. If you wear 40 you have to be shawn kemp to make it cool
Bethlehem Shoals: We should make a list of dull numbers
EF: 7 is really dull
BS: 6 isn't. 10 is.
EF: 11 isn't
BS: 20 is totally dull
EF: Yes, but not 21-24.
BS: 26 is.
EF: Anything above 5 in the ones place is. Except a single digit. Or 36.
BS: 48 isn't dull.
EF: 48 is dull. It's the number they give you when they don't know your name. It's the number for if you get blood on your jersey
BS: No way. 47-49 are all not dull.
EF: I think all primes are awesome.
BS: 1,3, 7, 11.. not sure about 11.
EF: 11 is the number of point guards. How could it be dull?
BS: Is there a number 51?
EF: 51 is awesome. You are aligning yourself with Randy Johnson and middle linebackers.
BS: 52 and 53 aren't. Those are primes.
EF: True. Revised: not all primes are awesome.
BS: But 52 isn't a prime, actually.
EF: That is a number for rebounders, e.g. Buck Williams.
BS: I've changed my mind on 26.
EF: 26 is close enough to the classic 20s that there is clearly something wrong with you. You are almost normal, but not quite.
BS: Right, like why weren't you 23, 24, 25? It's almost better than 0.
EF: Is 00 cool? Or just 0?
BS: 0 is played out.
EF: I really like 00 on guards.
BS: 00 is timelessly dumb. Like a bright plaid coat. EF: Is 23 cool or is it just there at this point?
BS: It's like changing your last name to DUNK or BASKETBALL, so that's on your jersey. You know what, I've changed my mind on 00. It's almost structural, like a porch. How do you feel about porches?
EF: What about 1? I feel like if you wear it as a big man, you're saying that you wish you were a guard, like with Amar'e. Also, I think Griffin will eventually change his jersey number because of this. Basically i think he should just mimic Amar'e's accessory decisions.
BS: You mean the glasses? EF: And becoming Jewish.
When Pro Basketball Prospectus 2010-11 came out, I told you all to buy it, and wrote a painfully eloquent, and personal, review of it for the Works. It discusses the ongoing question of math vs. experience, and how FD fits into. You might be surprised.
The more I talked to Kevin Pelton about the book, though, the more I realized that in many cases, PBP's conclusions (or hypotheses) are FD catnip. In other words, guys, we might be right! Sometimes. Here's his list of the book's Ten Most FD Moments, with some commentary from yours truly. I don't think they are in any particular order.
1. Josh Smith worth 13.5 WARP last season
Should have been an All-Star, kept out only by silly positional categories and a bad reputation he never really deserved. And yet anyone who watched him closely last year would tell you that Smith was absolutely indispensable. Not just because of the kind of team Atlanta had, but for the kind of game he has developed.
2. Rajon Rondo is the Celtics' "best player."
Exhibit A: This season. Maybe the Celtics are healthier, happier, and closer than ever. But when a system gains new clarity from top to bottom, there's no way interpersonal love and joy are responsible. You look to the guy with the rock, the man who sets it all into motion.
3. Rodrigue Beaubois' top comparable is Leandro Barbosa
Bittersweet, since Barbosa's career didn't quite turn out as expected. Still, I'll take a remake of that film any day over just another combo guard whose scoring gives us chills.
4. Monta Ellis used to be efficient way back in 2007-08
Suggesting, thusly, that when the Warriors have some rhythm to then, Monta can put up numbers while being a perfectly reasonable teammate. We're seeing that this year, and it's one of the early bright spots. The man has the tools of a sound, solid player, albeit one prone to fanciness around the hoop and 18-point quarters. Don't judge a book by its style!
5. Lamar Odom: "The unsung hero of the Lakers' back-to-back championships."
This is fast turning into: "Pelton sees the future, and it is very, very good to FD". Odom this season is the best he's been since Miami, and his ability to still step up and contribute shows that, in fact, he's been better integrated into the team's plan than we may have previously thought. His first few seasons in LA stunk, but now, he's settled into a near-ideal role. When "Lamar Odom" is a role, things are right in the world.
6. Brandon Jennings: "You can craft a good argument that he should have been Rookie of the Year."
I like Tyreke Evans a lot, but Jennings is the people's champ -- and sneaky good by the numbers, too. Strange for a player who is seemingly up and down as a pure point, and prone to poor shooting.
7. Anthony Randolph comparables: Tracy McGrady, Kevin Garnett, Joe Smith, Josh Smith
Given the season Randolph is having, this inconclusive, boom-or-bust mess -- like something you would understand only while about to slip into a black hole -- makes a certain amount of sense? Will he or won't he? What is that question even about? The best part about Randolph, which we're seeing with the Knicks, is that no one doubts his abilities. It's just totally unclear what the hell anyone's supposed to do with them. He might be the greatest useless player ever.
8. Kevin Durant: fourth-best WARP total of any player younger than 22
As we mention in the book, there's something historic about KD. It's just hard to nail it down. Apparently, the PBP people have.
9. DeMarcus Cousins: "statistical darling of the rookie class."
He is also probably the FD darling of the rookie class, with all the forgiveness, and ambivalence, implies by that phrase.
10. JaVale McGee led the league in block percentage
JaVale McGee is block percentage. What he does with that knowledge is up to him.
Jason Johnson is, by his own admission, not particularly stylish or athletic. He does however hold the distinction of being the world's tallest sports/style blogger. He can most often be found at clydefrazierapproves.com.
It was the fall 1998. The Jordan era had come to an end, again and even the lockout couldn’t hide the fact that the league was suffering through an identity crisis. Eastern and Central European players had begun to make their mark, but they were still tainted by an air of otherness. There was something unsavory about them. There were reports of players smoking cigarettes at half-time. Accounts of questionable hygiene. They didn’t attack the basket, bang in the post or play defense. In short, they were soft. That’s what I saw from the likes of Vlade Divac, Toni Kukoc. That’s what the announcers told me. For a tragically brief period Drazen Petrovic was an outlier, the exception that proved the rule, but like Big Pun, he just didn’t leave behind a large enough body of work to be adequately judged ..
At the time, I was living in a shipping container in the Balkans.The kind that got lost in the stacks, or served as a trans-Atlantic holding cell for smuggled human cargo, on Season Two of The Wire. I, along with another US soldier shared 20 x 8 box of corrugated steel for the better part of six months. We, a U.S. contingent of 9 were assigned to the makeshift Turkish Army Base on the grounds of an abandoned steel mill in Zenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina. For six days and twenty hours of each week, our world consisted of nine shipping containers; five bedrooms, kitchen, bath, office and weight room. The grounds of the base were sprawling, but most of the facility belonged to the Turks. They controlled the six-story office building along with all of the permanent outbuildings and warehouses.
About halfway between the U.S. Hooverville and the Turk Majal, at the bottom of the hill lay a basketball court. Originally put there so that the steelworkers could let off a little steam it had fallen into what could generously be called a state of disrepair. The concrete had cracked, and had begun to crumble in places and the metal backboard was speckled with rust. By the time we arrived, it had become home to a pack of mangy, stray dogs. We had to be armed at all times when leaving base, which meant no going into town to play ball. For us, the condition of the court was something of a minor tragedy.
With no court, and no NBA, we got our hoops fix via Playstation. My chief NBA Live partner was a local kid we hired as an interpreter. I don’t think I ever learned his real name, but everyone called him OJ. OJ seemed like your typical 25 year old slacker, with one difference: he was eighteen. “War ages you quickly,” he explained once. He was a healthy, good-looking ethnic Bosniak, and non-observant Muslim. He hadn’t grown up in the area, but like so many other Bosniaks, moved there after his hometown became less hospitable.
Reliably absent when actual translation services were needed, OJ would breeze through to play video games, drink slivovitz and talk hoops when we had down-time. I, a Knicks fan, was telling anyone who would listen at the time, that Allen Houston was the best shooting guard in the league (I know it seems ridiculous now, but Mike was gone, and Kobe hadn’t become Kobe and I could convince myself that AI was a point-guard). OJ insisted that some guy with a bunch of Ks, Vs and Zs in his name was better, but would never get the chance to show it, because NBA coaches were prejudiced. He claimed that American players lacked fundamental skills and would soon be exposed. It was easy to dismiss his claims as jingoistic nonsense, since American players were clearly superior as evidenced by the middling accomplishments of European players in the league. I don’t remember who he played with, but I do recall him running a penetrate-and-kick offense.
One fateful day, he challenged three of us to a half court game. Two of his friends had been hired as translators and now had NATO ID cards, which, with our permission, would get them on the base. Initially we protested that the court wasn’t safe but OJ insisted that only children need fear the dogs. I don’t know if I completely bought into that, but we weren’t exactly in a position where we could afford to look scared, so it was game on. My teammates were a 23-year-old kid from Minnesota, and a 30 year old from Iowa who probably hadn’t touched a basketball since high school. I figured that even if they couldn’t play, I could blow by or elevate over my man consistently enough to carry us.
The day came, and we found ourselves matched up against three college aged kids, who at 6’2” to 6’7” could all handle the rock and shoot the three. In the post, they possessed that wiry strength that, despite what we say, we don’t really believe exists. Every rebound was a struggle. They fought for the ball like it was something precious. None of them seemed to be able to dunk, yet all of them could jump high enough to block my attempts ... on the rare occasions that they actually let me get into the lane. Their physical interior defense made low-post play seem like an inefficient use of energy and forced us to rely on out nonexistent outside shooting. For three games we were thoroughly outclassed, as the beatings got progressively worse. I had lost my share of basketball games in the past, but never had I left a court so defeated. Other losses had been disheartening and even humiliating, but none had ever shaken my beliefs.
It doesn’t exactly take a genius to realize that war hardens people, so it is absurd to assume that these guys would be soft. Yet that’s just what we did. The stereotype of the soft, effete Euro isn’t as prevalent in today’s NBA as it was in 1998, but it still persists to a degree. It can be seen in the media’s coverage of Nenad Krstic’s chair flinging at this past summer’s friendly against Greece. We were treated to footage of an unhinged seven-footer throwing a chair in a brawl. Do you have any idea how terrifying that has to be in real life? I’d venture it’s a hell of a lot scarier than AI (allegedly) throwing a chair, and yet it carried very little of the sport’s media’s righteous indignation. In fact, it almost seemed to be played for laughs, and forgotten as soon as the World Championships began in earnest. Darko had a largely forgotten tirade where he threatened to rape a referee’s children. Neither of these players has been slapped with the “thug” tag yet.
It would be easy and lazy to pull the race card here, but I don’t think Kevin Love could have gotten away with that behavior either. Race is definitely a consideration, but it’s not the crucial component used in stereotyping foreign-born players. We, as American basketball fans are quick to stereotype our homegrown players as products of their environment. For so many European players, that environment is just…foreign. It’s our ignorance of their circumstance that leads to a fundamental misunderstanding of their personalities and temperments. You just can’t take those Euros too seriously when they try to act tough. It’s just too cute. Daily Thunder ran a piece called “Nenad Kristic Fights Like a Little Brother". It’s unfathomable how much more easily we dismiss the aggression of young men raised in literal war zones than those born in figurative war zones.
Over the years, FD has become associated with many things, some good, some bad. Among the leading positives is Big Baby Belafonte's dazzling artwork. Since the Style Guide was first released--ironically, you can't even see it anymore--Big Baby has popularized a distinctive, resonant way of looking at basketball. Literally. The Macrophenomenal Almanac and the Undisputed Guide expanded the audience for this exciting, perceptive, creative thinking, and Big Baby's work is as inextricably FD as anything else. We're all fortunate to say so. Those prints are something of a trademark. And a cash cow!
(Please note that I can write all of these nice things, however factual, because I've had absolutely nothing to do with the art. Like anyone else, I am a fan who looks on with amazement and appreciation.)
It's not just Big Baby, though. FD has been the launching point for a number of artistic explorations. Who could forget when Tom Ziller used his third-eye vision to teach that the day's mathematics was Z? Or more recently, when Hakeen was remembered amid the scribbles in your notepad that invented your life? FD has a proud artistic tradition.
Today may mark a departure from this distinguished history. Certainly, there is artwork that follows, and it very much endeavors to comment on this basketball which we hold dear. But that's the end of the similarity. Our latest episode offers decidedly less aesthetic appeal than that which is common among its predecessors. It might not even make any sense. The images that you're about to look upon are purposely lo-fi, functional in the service of expressing an idea, but not exactly ready to adorn the lavish halls of Slim Chin's manse.
These images grew out of a confused, meandering conversation that I had with Shoals one night last week as Derrick Rose played a sensational game that we hated. You may recall the capstone:
Less obvious while in plain sight, Derrick Rose took a customary straight path to the basket. He seems to always do that, eschewing soft angles and minute precision for hard darts and raging athleticism directed in a single vector. Rose can change directions, of course, but he explodes in a series of discrete movements, no matter how quickly he may change from one to another. His motion isn't united as a single brush stroke. It is a collection of lines, a pile of pickup sticks arrayed in new patterns but always limited by the component parts. Another image that immediately appeared in my mind was one of a locomotive laying down its own tracks as it rumbled along. Shoals was almost mad at Rose for this. We agreed that it was dissonant. For all of his obvious physical prowess, Rose has a limited game. Only, the limit is born of convenience. He isn't a wonderful shooter, his court vision is not an unmistakable strength, and he does not pose a threat from all over. Derrick Rose doesn't need that. Instead, he's something of a perfect scoring weapon, a man who invariably finds himself at the rim after picking a trail and racing forward along it. The shit works.
Brute strength and straight-line basketball are shrill traits for a point guard in this new era of the position's pitch-perfect primacy. While styles among the leading point guards vary, seemingly each one makes far more sense for its master than Rose's does for a player as physically competent. Shoals and I mulled this over for a while before intervening commitments left us at the point where artwork comes into the story. Lost in the morass we commonly create as our online ruminations crash into each other, we agreed that I would endeavor to create simple visuals that captured the overriding impressions respectively left by my favorite guards. This, we thought, might help us better articulate what Derrick Rose is, exactly. I am not sure that I succeeded, but maybe it will start a better conversation.
The following is not intended as a defense of Jay Caspian Kang's post on Kevin Garnett. Mr. Kang is a quite able-bodied young man and can speak for himself, in these parts or elsewhere if he should so choose, whenever he so pleases. Nor is it any sort of attack on the man they call Rough Justice, who has contributed to FD in the past and is, at There Are No Fours, a writer you should digest on a regular basis.
That said, I would like to take some of this quality 6AM airplane time to address RJ’s post from yesterday, where he lashed out at Jay’s Kevin Garnett post and raised some broader critiques of the FreeDarko way of life. Let it first be said that my feelings on Garnett-Villanueva are uncharacteristically murky. In a purely ethnographic manner, I dismissed CV’s tweet-borne outrage as “just not the way things are done.”
I wasn’t only the writer to say, in not so many words, “come on Charlie V., WE PLAYIN’ BASKETBALL!” Rather than take a moral position, I was content to relativize, or romanticize, or whatever, and say that sports are awesome and athletes, subject to more special rules than the rest of us, even when it comes to the expectation of half-decent conduct. I heard from readers who wondered why the near-rampant homophobia of sports wasn’t somehow entering this discussion; in talking with Jay, I started to think that here, Garnett was the exception that proved the rule.
There’s a lot that can be empirically, and affirmatively, chalked up to the culture of the sport. When is trangression transgressed? When, as in this case, the speech-act is both resoundingly dull and just plan mean (as in petty). The common currency, or rules of engagement, is all about drive, rancor and wit. Going too far and not going far enough are strangely intertwined.
As for Garnett himself, to call his intensity performative is by no means to discount it. If KG is one-hundred percent authentic – which, mind you, is different from sincere – out on the court, he would be almost alone in sports. Part of playing the game is playing the game, playing mind games, and any other such cliché you can call up to register the duality that is the competitive self. If you hate that sentence, just say “nature and nurture” three times fast. Garnett, like pretty much any other person looking to topple others in his field, is closed loop with no beginning or end. He wouldn’t be driven to so fastidiously project the character he does if he weren’t, on some level, really that hell-bent on succeeding. Yet as the Recluse suggests, KG’s allowing himself to be so swayed by lawless emotion is easily attribute to Jordan-era basketball socialization. From there, though, we’re right back at “but it takes the right kind to so totally embrace, and even further amplify, the lessons of MJ’s persona”.
I can quite artificially pick and choose what Garnett traits to admire, or at least enjoy -- cussing at no one in particular, banging his head on the padded goalpost, needlessly blocking shots after the whistle, barking like a dog, and slapping the floor on defense for no other reason than to fire himself up further. That John Thompson interview, the “loading up the clip” sound bite, and that dolorous adidas commercial with the stand-up comedy section, these are all pure gold to me. Yet that’s a false dichotomy. These are part and parcel with the bullying, dirty play, and complete and total loss of perspective while on the court that increasingly, have become the hallmark of Garnett’s on-court demeanor. Part of it is the move from Minny to Boston, which got Garnett out from under that all-consuming cloud of pathos and made him less eternally sympathetic and – since he was suddenly playing on a real team – eccentric. Going from feel-good super-team to brooding contenders further concretized Garnett. You just couldn’t look at him any more as a powerful, twisted curiosity. He was out on center stage, and then after 2008, a professional who didn’t care to leave room for our indulgences. Getting older didn’t help, either.
That’s to say, I neither quite agree with Jay, nor with the part of me that could once be brought to tears by a 2002 shot of Garnett guarding Webber. Before, Garnett was an extreme version of competition with no object. Once he got a taste of its applications – the only role that would ever make sense for him, long-term – he changed, but our perception changed, too. The KG of Minnesota was a parable, a folk hero, a creative act that drew in athlete and fan alike to create mythology. He was perfect for the purposes of this website, but I can’t pretend he wasn’t kind of a dick all along, or that the way he looks in this second act somehow stands apart from the earlier KG. What I’m learning now is that I’m stuck with both, and that they’re actually one and the same.
Much of Rough Justice’s post was directed at Jay; I may have indirectly addressed them, but the point here isn’t to rush to the aid of the last thing published on this site. What really interests me is RJ’s assertion that liberated fandom and team faithfulness are not mutually exclusive. To this I say, duh. To be perfectly honest about it, the “manifesto” in our first book did the concept of liberated fandom a great disservice. I was only barely responsible for it; it was put together by forces beyond my control, and I was too busy to complain that it tacked way too extreme for my part. Plus, I heard it would help sell books.
On this blog, I have never suggested that liberated fandom meant players over teams, or that pure aesthetics are all that is to be gleaned from basketball. What excites me about basketball is that, at its best, a team is not only the sum of individuals – it has nearly the same amount of personality. Furthermore, winning is always a question of aesthetics, and aesthetics employed primarily in the service of winning. It’s the interplay between these two poles that, to me, exemplifies the NBA. And while I’ve always scoffed at being chained to a single team, especially when players shift around so much, I’ve always taken it as license to have a rooting interesting in a bunch, with one or two sometimes elevating themselves above all others. Granted, oftentimes my more casual interest in a team is a function of a player or two, but for what it’s worth, I’ve always been known to turn my back on individual players. In short, liberated fandom is more like free love than a weird fetish, or unlimited free porn downloads.
That’s all I have to say on the subject for now. There is precious little rock in my iTunes. I have some thoughts on legacy that I’ve been meaning to get up for a while now, so let’s so how bored I get on this next flight. The television isn’t working on here but I wasn’t expecting it in the first place.
Jay Caspian Kang has a tumblr where he mostly posts videos of bad rap acts from the late nineties. Follow him on twitter at maxpower51.
Two nights ago, I walked around the Mission and watched as thousands of elated Giants fans flooded out of the bars and into the streets to celebrate. As I walked deeper down 24th Street towards the frontlines of gentrification, where handcrafted coffee houses with vaguely German names have staked out their own turf in the never-ending battle between the Nortenos and the Surenos, the scene didn’t change much. Everyone was elated, yelling. Even the nerdy brand of San Francisco hipster, the ones who can’t figure out how to dress interestingly, were out cheering on their stoops. The honking of horns, the unabashed revelry, the energy of the city was unlike anything I’d ever seen before. And although I have no allegiance to the Giants or even to the Bay Area, I found myself thinking of all the Roger Angell and Philip Roth quotes I had long since cast off as being sentimental, ridiculous. Baseball was stitching together a civic consciousness, a shared ecstasy. What that was worth was open for debate, but it certainly had an undeniable power to bring people together into something approximating a joyful moment.
A lifelong Red Sox fan, I watched Game 7 of the 2004 ALCS in a piano bar in midtown Manhattan. The bar itself had no mounted screens, but someone had wedged a small TV in one of the bar’s shelves. Me and the bartender were the only people who were watching. My new art school friends were watching the performance artist Soy Bomb sing the National Anthem of a fake country, in some language he had made up. When Johnny Damon’s grand slam cleared the short porch, I yelped, took out my phone and started furiously texting my friends back in Boston. My art school friends gave me a look usually reserved for cute Special Olympians and dogs who try to walk on their hind legs. I remember feeling a tingle at the back of my skull, a charge flood into my fingertips—the usual bodied indications that something was changing. Just three months prior, I had graduated from a college where the major social activity was crowding into the campus pub to watch the Red Sox. Now, I was sitting in a piano bar with friends-of-friends of a performance artist best known for jumping up on stage with Bob Dylan during some Grammy performance. I wondered how long it would be before I would stop seeking out the small TV in the corner of the bar. When would being friends-of-friends of Soy Bomb become my life? A year? Three months?
As it turned out, the tingly feeling was just the effects of the awful garlic-infused vodka I had been drinking. I kept watching sports, but as my priorities changed, I found myself caring less and less about whether or not my team won or lost.
By the time the Sox won again in 2007, I had started reading FreeDarko, which provided me with a name for my particular sports affliction. Liberated Fandom made sense, not only because my beloved childhood losers had been usurped by a bunch of rowdy Cowboy Up dickbags, but also because it allowed for a different engagement with sports, one that seemed to fit better with my particular circuitry. I’m sure that most of the people reading this are doing so because they, at some point, felt a similar detachment from caring whether a team won or lost, but could not quite pry themselves away from the intricacies, and, at times, the beauty of the spectacle on the court.
Within this aesthetic realm, where players exist as performers, who, while never completely excerpted from the calculus of winning and losing, share a relationship to the game similar to that of an opera diva and the libretto, the prima donnas are the Pedro Martinezes, the Allen Iversons, the Griffey Juniors. Those athletes, through their individual brilliance and magnetic personality, transcend the manufactured drama of millionaires pretending to collectively care about beating other millionaires in a fully corporatized game. The anti-heroes are always those millionaires who would have you believe that there is nothing more vital to humanity than whether or not they win or lose a playoff series.
Yes, as fans, we demand the players care about winning, losing and loyalty, but there also exists an unspoken line where the athlete should not cross. Namely, they should never, ever, never-ever-ever remind us that the scope of their lives is larger than our own. The history of fans violently turning against an athlete is just a list of athletes who felt entitled to publically disregard a communal rule. Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire cheated and we got mad because most of us don’t (or can’t) cheat at our jobs. The answer to LeBron’s Nike question is this: we wanted you to swap employers with quiet dignity, because when we switch jobs, nobody really cares. And since we like to think of ourselves as people who work hard at our jobs, we also demand the athlete care, but when he steps off the field of play, we expect him to be the sort of guy, who, to quote some disastrous election logic from a few years back, we can have a beer with.
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In the dungeon of tunnel-visioned stars, only Barry Bonds has carried the excesses of caring-too-much as poorly and awkwardly as Kevin Garnett. Jordan was protected by doting reporters and the persistence and impenetrability of the mask he wore whenever he was in front of a camera. Kobe is saved by his visible intelligence, his occasional moments of thoughtfulness. Garnett has never possessed any of these graces, or, at the very least, the institutional guidance to occasionally edit out his excesses. What’s worse, there’s always been something a bit off about Garnett’s famed intensity—he doesn’t quite burn in the same way that Chris Paul burns, he doesn’t have Isaiah’s grim determination, he doesn’t have Rodman’s “fuck it, we’re winning” mentality.
With Garnett, there’s always a sense of insecure theater, of a man who hasn’t quite convinced himself of the virtues and authenticity of his passions. We all know people like this in our daily lives—the sneering indie snob, the violently overprotective mother, the religious blowhard. When Garnett started crying in front of John Thompson in that famed TNT interview, I remember feeling bad for him, not because he was sick of losing, but rather, because he, in true Jimmy Swaggart style, felt the need to imbue such wild theatrics into his caring. When he made the comment about going to war and bringing teks and grenades, I remember thinking, “He just doesn’t get it.” Nothing that’s happened in the interim, from the weirdness of his championship ranting to last night’s confrontation with Charlie Villanueva and today’s bizarre attempt at an explanation, has budged that perception.
Anyone who has played pickup basketball has come across the guy who compulsively and needlessly bullies other players. These guys always force you into that ugly headspace, wherein you must calculate what is more debasing: to endure their abuse or to fight back. On Tuesday night, Charlie Villaneuva made a bad compromise by tattling via twitter, when the more appropriate response might have been to punch Garnett in the mouth and let the public decide whether or not it was justified. Strangely, it was Villanueva’s twitter activity, and not Garnett’s trash-talking, that violated an unspoken code: the one that dictates athletes take care of their own business without turning to the public opinion. And while I’m not so naïve as to say that Garnett’s comments marked some unbreached depth of trash-talking, I don’t find it instructive or even interesting, really, to argue whether or not this is in or out of character for him, specifically, or for NBA players, at large.
I’m certain there are tons of assholes who say asshole-ish things on the court. But a history of boorish behavior shouldn’t excuse what Garnett said and it certainly should not change the prevailing opinion on the sort of guy he has become. We all know he is the irrational, manic bully on the court, the one who you just wish would get a girlfriend or find a job he enjoys, the same guy who ruins it for everyone else. And we know that sometimes the bully’s intensity, even if its fraudulent at its core, can rub off on his teammates. What sometimes results is five guys who cry at every foul call, who puff out their chests and talk shit, who throw elbows and who say things that turn an otherwise friendly, enjoyable game into a slap-battle of dicks. There is no question that Garnett’s “edge” has helped the Celtics win games, but it’s also created a litany of ugly moments in which Garnett physically attacks and threatens much smaller men. Any rational fan, really, anyone who doesn’t salivate at the thought of jumping strangers, should feel their stomach turn whenever they watch one of these encounters. And, I’d argue, if what Charlie Villanueva said is true, and there’s no reason to doubt his word, especially when compared to Garnett’s preposterous explanation, anyone with any decency or compassion should cringe when they hear about a grown man evoking the words “cancer patient” while ridiculing another grown man about a rare genetic condition that causes him to have no body hair.
Let’s remember: the bully ruins every pick-up game. The moment Garnett was traded to the Celtics, he ruined yet another one of my childhood teams. I haven’t rooted for the Celtics since and I’ve enjoyed the NBA more.
It was a strange swing—from witnessing the elation of a city over the Giants to the ugly reminder that there is a way to care too much about sports and championships. Garnett has always been my benchmark for twisted intensity, for what happens when an athlete takes the dogma of winning-at-all-costs and turns it into something ugly and indefensible. Sports, after all, are not war, and although we burden the stage with military props and metaphors, I don’t think the model we envision for our athletes is wrong. The best should play with passionate intensity, but there is a sportsmanlike way to perform any task, especially one as fundamentally meaningless as trying to put a ball through a hoop more times than your opponent. Yes, Garnett has done this before and he will do it again and the next Garnett will do the same, but that doesn’t mean we have to continue to confuse cruelty with competitiveness and a genuinely pathetic lack of perspective with intensity. Why can’t we just call an asshole an asshole every time he acts like an asshole? What the fuck do we owe Kevin Garnett?
More shortly. For now, enjoy this Monta-Bill Withers highlight bonanza, commissioned by yours truly, realized by Outside the NBA. So happy they decided to make this happen.
Colin Cowherd said some shit yesterday, it made me sicker and sicker, so here's 2,000 words on FanHouse taking him to task line-by-line. What a punk.
The dudes at BwB/HHR have been kind enough to put together a booze-soaked afterparty in NYC, following FD's Strand reading on 11/30. More info here. You should sign up for headcount purposes, but it's free, and everyone's invited.
If you want to read me gushing about Nic Batum, complaining about Nate McMillan, and wondering exactly why there can't be such a thing as a plastic system (outside of the Spurs), click here.
Otherwise, I am going to talk about politics. Don't worry, this won't be 2008's shrill, impermissible left-wing ranting. If it were, we would quickly end up in highly questionable discussions about whether or not the American voter gets what he deserves; whether the right to vote needs to be aggressively defended with lawyers and knives; and whether, as someone who didn't lift a finger this election season past filling out my ballot, I have any right to be so indignant. The crazy thing is, as much as I want the Tea Party to govern itself back into the Stone Age, I'm nearly as sick of progressives with no grasp of realpolitik. You lose the right to play the "we're the smart, rational ones" card when you fail to see that two-party politics only get so good -- and elected officials only so smart and bold. In Obama, we've done pretty damn well. Even if he didn't save the world. That was some secular Jesus crap, and you all should have known better. Have you never watched The West Wing?
Once you reach that point, then elitism is empty, and subject to any and all critiques.
Again, though, you probably shouldn't listen to me. Even though there's arguably just as much at stake this November as there was in 2008, I didn't do anything to help the cause. I probably tailed off on following politics, especially if you don't count the Tea Party freak show as anything other than entertainment. The belief that Obama would reshape the universe may have been misguided, and the correlation between symbolic and actual social change greatly overstated (if such a thing ever existed). The right accused him of being a Nazi fascist commie, but let's be real about this: No one since you-know-when has aestheticized politics to the extent that Obama did (GLENN BECK THERE'S YOUR SMOKING GUN IT'S CALLED WALTER BENJAMIN!!!!). As a speaker, it was like seeing Jordan in his prime. So you've got politics-as-art, plus rhetoric of the gods. It's not hard to see why we all turned out in droves to make calls, round up voters, and most importantly, hit the polls ourselves. Especially when the other side was ugly, but not yet truly demonic, or so far-reaching and ingrained in the way this country sees itself. We, the young and relatively young, swung the last election. It was a blast, and I think anyone would do it all over again.
Two years later, there is no fun, or exaltation, in sight. Depending on how you see it, Obama has been unmasked, or fallen victim to harsh reality, or made us all feel like chumps for thinking that things would be different this time -- that his campaign would be literal, rather than figurative. We spend our time laughing at the right when, in fact, kooks like Sharron Angle have a good shot at winning. There are thousands and thousands of voters out there who are far angrier, and more stupid, than we were inspired in 2008. This isn't going away overnight, or in a year. Or even two. It will only get worse on the ground.
But there is something very basic we can do. Vote. At very least, keep remotely sane people in office. This isn't about idealism, or what kind of country you would build in a tea cup. It's about not being dragged down by a combination of opportunistic knaves, blood-curdling ignorance, and a form of populism with all the common sense, and force, of an avalanche. STOP THE PEOPLE, for they know not themselves. Go vote, and then get back to basketball.
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