Yago's latest post from his Cultures of Basketball course is up, where he subjects the students to my "Mikan and Modernity" essay. That's the chapter I was both most shaky on and, idea-wise, the most proud of. Yago homed in on my view of Mikan as the first true individual in the game, and in doing so, drew out the definition of "modern" that begins around Descartes. That view of individuality—that it is about style, the "how" as much as the "what"—informs most of the way I see the game, and would become indispensable to the game when African American players invaded in the mid-fifties. He told me over email that to him, the irony of uber-nerd loosing the concept of style upon professional basketball is almost too good to be true. It's worth noting, though, that the Globetrotters and Rens had been around before Mikan, which certainly suggest that Mikan was more an unlikely conduit, or a strange point of entry, rather than the originator.
When I was writing it, though, I was focused primarily on not how the individuality's relationship to time and space, but the notion that in the NBA, a unique relationship to time and space was the essence of individuality. Mikan wasn't an individual who proved this through a unique relationship to time and space; he was an individual precisely because of this. It's far easier to apply this logic to Mikan, or even Pettit, than Russell or Baylor in the years that followed. I will now blame it all on my framework, which I blame on a desperate need to either make use of what I learned in grad school, or justify all the pop-science-cultural-history reading I do for fun. I was thinking of the way that, after the Industrial Revolution had once and for all put a large part of the populace on the clock (literally and figuratively), new developments like the railroads, the telegraph, and widespread electricity destabilized this concept, as well as that of space.
How, in history, does this lead to individuality? I'm not quite sure, other than the fact that suddenly, daylight and travel were nearly as plastic as you wanted them to be; the transmission of information could take weeks or seconds, depending on your inclination. I will need someone far smarter than me to explain how that's a useful expansion of the metaphysical "I", rather than a distraction from it. I am certainly not ready to say that our sense of time's existential weight is what gives rise to George Mikan. We'll save Heidegger for positionality, where Being and Time is the internal, and later Martin is the external individual. Derrida or Ornette Coleman give us the organizing principles (such as they are).
To close this on a thoroughly self-deprecating note: Whether the historical analog is the early 17th century, or the late 19th, you have, in a sense, history being compared to history. It makes considerably more sense to explain how these developments in basketball parallel those of the larger cultural context of the time, as I did with Wilt and the Cold War. Too bad they don't. Actually, it reminds me of what Jacob said was the difficulty of making wacky comparisons in this book's illustrations: to paraphrase, all sports history is mythology. It's one thing to compare a current star to Shakespeare, or the Wright Brothers. However, someone like Wilt or Cousy is already in some sense a mythological figure. It's an awkward juxtaposition, so you either have to make it especially timely (a form of literalism) or retreat into symbolism. I have no idea why Naismith as Moses (or all the other things I compared him to) works.
Bio: Rough Justice guarantees he would pass a doping control urine test, but only because they haven't invented a drug that could give him Andrei Kirilenko's hairdo yet. Check out his other work over at his blog There Are No Fours.
Doping suffuses professional sports. Ask almost any fan, athlete or talking head how they feel about performance-enhancing drugs and you’ll get an earful of righteous judgment, but drugs are part of the sports landscape for good because they work and because the money at stake overwhelms the various reasons why players might abstain.
Dopers aren’t acting out a set of beliefs contrary to the masses; they’re acting out their desire to win the fame and money that success will bring, or simply trying to win. The margins between pro and failure, between starter and backup are often slim enough that the extra boost chemistry can provide will bridge the gap for someone who can’t quite make it. Authorities can try to stop use with penalties, but testing doesn’t eradicate illicit PED use; it creates an arms race between the chemists creating new, subtler drugs and the chemists inventing new tests to sniff out those new drugs.
The NBA has so far avoided a large dustup about drug use, with a few isolated incidents that were explained away easily enough, but in light of OJ Mayo’s suspension it’s worth taking a look at what PED use in the NBA might look like.
There is no sport immune to chemistry, but individual sports are affected differently and to different degrees by doping. At the far end of the spectrum, any sort of racing is completely vulnerable to drugs. Cycling is the sport with the biggest drug problem precisely because a bike racer engaging in oxygen-vector doping will beat a similarly talented non-doper every single time. The NFL, where speed and strength are the main currencies for position not named quarterback, showcases defensive ends faster than the defensive backs your father watched, but skill position players need to be able to read defenses and run routes as much as they need to have a good time in the 40 yard dash. Still, in a sport where brute strength is a key asset for 80% of the players on the field, steroid use will always be a huge advantage.
The breaks built into the game also provide enough rest that the stamina problems bulking up might cause don’t undermine effectiveness. Shawne Merriman’s suspension and subsequent accolades and blowback strongly suggest the sport isn’t clean, but also that the NFL views this primarily as a PR problem. No one needs the baseball doping conversation to be rehashed. Basketball, hockey and soccer have remained largely incident-free; that doesn’t mean that they aren’t being affected by PEDs, but their structure and play limit the effect drugs can have more than other sports.
Simply put, the precision of the NBA game means that doping isn't a direct path to success. Being bigger and stronger helps, but good players marry that to the finesse to finish plays or the jumpshot they've honed since childhood. If physical ability alone determined success on the court, Gerald Green would be thinking up the next cupcake dunk, not plying his trade in Russia.
The NBA is a second-order sport for PEDs, one where doping can aid ability but not generate it. As a fan of both baseball and professional cycling, I’m cynical enough about the issue to assume that some non-zero percent of NBA players are doping. Older guys trying to eke out a last season or two, injury-prone players trying to get/stay healthy, skilled but underathletic players trying to make it, second-tier guys trying to break through into stardom, there are plenty of reasons why a professional basketball player would turn to chemical assistance.
But the best players aren’t the biggest or fastest, they’re the guys who are best at getting the ball in the hoop and stopping their man from doing the same. Physical shortcomings matter, but skills that are forged by time in the gym do too, and there’s no chemical shortcut to Ray Allen’s jumpshot or Kobe Bryant’s footwork. LeBron is the best player in the NBA not just because he’s 6’8”, jacked and quick, but also because he can shoot, pass, defend and position himself at an elite level. There are only a handful of players who can succeed in professional basketball without possessing an NBA body, but there are also countless players who couldn’t succeed despite having that body.
At the end of his response to O.J. Mayo’s suspension, Henry Abbott said “Players are bigger, stronger and faster than ever. Many of the world's finest enhancers are impossible to test for…Is it really smart to stick with the theory that performance enhancing drugs are just not a problem in the NBA?” It’s true players are bigger and faster than ever, but that’s not any evidence of drug use specifically. It ignores the fact that NBA players strength train and condition in a way that was unheard of a few decades ago, and the current generation is the first to have such methods available throughout their youth careers. NBA players used to smoke!
Players are taller than ever before, but the NBA draws players from a larger genetic pool, both because the sport is global and because the US population has continued its steady climb. Medical advancements mean MRIs and new surgeries can let players continue playing after what would have been career-ending ten years ago. PEDs may well have a part in the physical talents on NBA rosters, but it’s not like the physiological changes we’ve seen can’t be explained without them.
The NBA has a testing policy for a reason. It’s not there purely as a PR ploy; if there were no reason for basketball players to use PEDs there would also be no need for testing. But if you paid much attention to how baseball players explained their steroid use you learned that most users got started by following the “here, try this” plan offered by a teammate. Professional athletes operate in a bubble and don’t by and large have sophisticated knowledge about biochemistry, so they would have to rely on others to introduce them to drugs.
I don’t doubt that some players have followed this route, but unless players are doing a fantastic job of conspiring to keep a league-wide habit secret, the users are likely individuals injecting or ingesting at home, clinging to the edge they’re giving themselves over their compatriots. Morality isn’t the only impediment to PED use; acquisition isn’t necessarily an easy task. I’m sure there are players in the NBA who would take a drug if it were put in front of them but don’t have the first clue where they would go to get it.
Not only that, but there’s no one drug that would benefit every player in the league. Part of the reason for steroid ubiquity in baseball and football and EPO ubiquity in cycling is that those PEDs help every athlete. Baseball and football are all fast-twitch actions that are over within ten seconds. Steroids make everyone faster and stronger. Everyone can benefit from hitting a ball farther, throwing it harder or running faster.
Similarly, every cyclist will be better at his job if his circulatory system does a better job of delivering oxygen to his muscles. But the different roles and skills of a basketball team make it unlikely that any drug, other than HGH, would benefit everyone. An shooter who makes his living running his defender all game and curling around screens would gain from taking a drug that aided his stamina. A post player would do well to bulk up so he could push people around. A slasher could exploit a few more inches of vertical leap. But if different players on a team would benefit from different drugs, they’d all have to find them via their own routes unless a drug culture was truly pervasive or a team was actively helping its players dope.
Players might take the risk of exposure inherent in sharing drugs with a teammate for team gain, but given the variety of body types and skill sets you find in any given locker room, NBA doping would have to be more diffuse than the doping is in any of the sports that have established problems.
O.J. Mayo claims the DHEA in his system is from a supplement he vetted poorly. That’s an eminently plausible claim. As far as I can tell, DHEA isn’t a masking agent or precursor for anything else, and it’s currently legal to sell it over the counter. It’s possible he was using it as a steroid, but unless he had very high levels of it in his system, it’s much more likely he did a terrible job reading labels at GNC. It’s possible he’s a cheater, but it’s more likely he’s a knucklehead. This isn’t Mark McGwire with Androstenedione in his locker.
If I had to guess, I would say NBA doping is a low-level phenomenon. I would be shocked if use were higher than one out of every ten players precisely because the returns for doping are more limited in the sport than in others. I would be even more shocked if no one in the NBA were using PEDs. But in today’s media environment, where baseball dopers have been excoriated in the press for their “crimes”, a basketball player who is regularly drug tested would have to be careful about what he was doing and to whom he mentioned it. The tacit approval that aided steroids in baseball does not and has never existed in the NBA.
A player who was doping would use HGH, EPO or some other drug that is undetectable in a urine sample. If OJ Mayo were a serious doper, you can be sure he wouldn’t risk exposure by having something as easily detectable as DHEA in his system. If we’re going to have a serious conversation about performance-enhancing drugs in the NBA, I’m all for it. But OJ Mayo almost certainly has nothing to do with it.
2/24: SAN FRANCISCO Get ready for fear, also at 7PM ... Green Apple Books is hosting a night of FD and beer. Join Tom Ziller, Eric Freeman, and myself for a panel, moderated by our old friend Eli Horowitz of McSweeney's. I don't drink but plan to eat lots of apples. Also, I have never actually met Tom before.
Or, if for once you want a title that makes sense, "Who Owns a Meme"?
I don't claim to have invented the "Positional Revolution". That would be the players who dared to do fifteen-hundred things at once, or the coaches subverting the conventions of their day. But I do know that I coined the phrase, started the conversation (on the internet) at least, and, have pursued it with some seriousness for the last 4.5 years, along with the help of brave souls like Tom Ziller. Unlike that batty "Liberated Fandom", which was formulaic, purposefully rude, and at some point gives way to common sense, I am relatively proud of the writing I've done about positionality in the NBA, and even the phrase "Positional Revolution" itself. When I was in OKC, I had a long conversation with Sam Presti about it and didn't feel the least bit self-conscious, something of a minor miracle for me.
Why am I bringing this up, on a near-defunct blog whose readers are well familiar with my snappy little phrases? Well, it appears the Positional Revolution has gone mainstream, and I've been left behind. There is a band that makes a perfect analogy here, but I'm blanking on their name. Last summer, the blogosphere suddenly flared up with new discussions of position, and quickly, the phrase "Positional Revolution" entered the picture. I thought this was neat, until it kept going, with no acknowledgment of, well, ME. Finally, I spoke out, and was accused of, basically, not understanding that online, everybody knows I made up that term and constant genuflection would be a waste of everybody's time. I posted something pissy that updated my thoughts and then went on with my life.
Well, it's back again, but this time, I genuinely worried from a "branding" and "marketplace of ideas" standpoint.
It doesn't really matter that Rob Mahoney and I disagree on some of the finer points of positionality and its discontents. If you want, when my back hurts less and I'm less generally angry, I can link up all the posts I've done, many of them with TZ, on the subject of structure in basketball. Basically, categories must wither and die, and instead you get heuristic groupings that vary depending on situations. The re-distribution of responsibilities takes place not only on the macro- level of a starting line-up, but also within the ebb and flow of any given possession. This is possible because of players who feel, and respond to, the game in this way; as I wrote in 2007, "the Positional Revolution becomes most radical when the inflamed individual is transubstantiated into a form of basketball logic." Certainly, it doesn't really get into defense, something Danny Leroux has dealt with.
The point is that, when the phrase "Positional Revolution" is written about at great length on the New York Times site without my receiving any credit, it upsets me. I can't assume that everyone reading Rob's piece there knows about what I've done in the past. Is that egotism? Maybe. But it's also a question of how much right I have to be identified with this conversation that sprang up from the web—especially when it's a phrase I coined myself. When I load up the NBA page of Business Insider, a site I write for, and find Adam Fusfeld crediting Rob with ushering in a new era of positions, I can't help but get frustrated and write in this tone.
I know, I have no right to complain about anything, my life is one big party, etc. But you try and spend hours and hours working through an idea—even coming up with a snappy name for it—only to find yourself more or less invisibly as it starts to find a wider audience. Or, to be perfectly blunt about it, this was my Revolution. Take it up if you want, just don't, in effect, pass it off as your own. And yes, at some point, omission is an insult, not proof that my ideas have become part of the ether.
On second though, I'll just trademark the term, and content myself with royalties. Since that's what this is really all about.
As Dr. Santiago Colas conducts his Cultures of Basketball course at Michigan, and writes a bunch about it, we here at FD are committed to participating as second-hand participants, albeit with a somewhat privileged perspective. Yago's last two classes dealt with the early pro leagues and the great (and zany) barnstorming operations. Here, Jacob and I discuss his posts:
Bethlehem Shoals: It kind of blows my mind, and not necessarily in a good way, that our "textbook" includes the self-deprecating line about Jews being good at business and penny-pinching. Remember, we had to fight, gnash our teeth, and over-write in the master files to keep that in? At the time, it felt like a good inside joke, and the sort of thing we should be allowed to do, given our audience. But it is a little strange that college students would stumble across that line in what's, on all other counts, a pretty serious book about race and culture in sports. There's some sarcasm, to be sure. Flat-out irony, though? This might be the one line that lays it on that thick -- obviously, we only felt comfortable doing that with our own ethnic group -- and yet if the class isn't familiar with anti-Semitism (probably a good thing), I have no idea how that line comes across. The real shame might be that it comes at the high point of Jews as players of the game, which tarnishes that, in a way. Actually, maybe it makes it stronger, since there's no reason we can imagine the era of the Jews to have been one where, as a historical space, Jewish humor is free to roam the plains.
Jacob Weinstein: While I agree that line is sort of a tonal shift from the rest of the book, what it really highlights to me is the awkwardness and artificiality of lumping all these barnstorming teams together to begin with. Given the space considerations of the book it made sense, but really there is a huge difference in the quality and the historical importance of teams like the Celtics, Rens and Globetrotters, and teams like Olson's Terrible Swedes or the House of David which were almost sideshow or novelty acts. The SPHAs were sort of a middle ground, neither a novelty act nor a truly dominant team like the Celtics, and I think an ironic aside sneaks in mostly because, as you noted, it was our own ethnic group, but also because the entire section was a weird mix of bold face tragedies (Globetrotters) historical footnotes (Kues) and pure absurdity (House of David).
And while the SPHAs certainly were a legit team, in my research it seems like even former players or fans still regard the team with some good humor. In no small part because the organizational structure of the time was such a mess, and the rules themselves were in such flux, it's hard to even get a read on the quality of the team's play. For example, what does the high point of Jews as players of the game even mean, if the game they excelled in was so alien from what we know as basketball today? It's almost like claiming to have been the best doctor during the Middle Ages. And that's why I think the ethnic underpinning of the team--and the accompanying stereotypes-- really become almost all there is to remember. Otherwise, we could have just featured some other random team from the era like the Paterson Crescents or the Brooklyn Visitations. Newark Mules stand up!
BS: It's only artificial and awkward insofar as the game itself was, at that time, still kind of a mess. Barnstorming teams, whether they were the Globetrotters or the House of David, played whatever competition that town could offer up. Since players in the early pro leagues (so strange to call it "early", since we're talking about nearly fifty years -- as long as the "modern" game has been around) were hardly getting rich, we can assume that they were part of that equation. That's what makes the Buffalo Germans so representative: it's impossible to tell if they were a total fraud because the line between legitimate and illegitimate ball was so blurred. I'm sure there were plenty of nights that the Original Celtics got to phone it in against a bunch of eager high school students.
What's interesting to me, though, is that while the barnstorming teams did have this self-undermining quality to them, they also introduced and disseminated new ideas about the game. I'm not one-hundred percent sure about this, but it seems like most of the actual developments in how to play the game -- as opposed to the parameters and rules -- came out of barnstorming teams. At least until the forties. The Celtics are important for developing the pick and roll, not their inflated win-loss record; the Globetrotters paved the way for pretty much any basketball played with style and creativity. Oddly, this brings it all back to the Paul Gallico quote that inspired our own off-color line: the SPHAS may not have been a truly dominant team, or even all that well-organized, but it's clear that they brought something to the game that resonated with those watching it comes into focus. Granted, today we have a somewhat different notion of the "city game", and yet the idea of a tough, streetwise, crafty player who is slick without being smooth -- that's still part of the way we talk about basketball today.
JW: Yeah, I guess you're right. Basketball was just a mess back then. Even now I still have no idea how we could have presented those barnstorming teams in a more logical or truthful way. But what I think I was trying to bring the discussion around to was Yago's questions of "How do we tell the pre-history of something, when they didn't know they were a part of anything," which, likewise, I'm still befuddled by. The game these teams were playing between the 1890s and 1950s was undoubtedly basketball, but at the edges you sort of have to squint to convince yourself of that.
As for the barnstorming teams introducing new ideas to the game, I would definitely agree. And while non-barnstorming players were probably just as crucial in coming up with innovations, the barnstormers certainly were more important in disseminating those ideas, since they were playing hundreds of games a year all over the country. What's interesting to me is the constant battle between these player innovations and the rules from on-high--I guess what Yago would call spontaneity and calculation. And to further complicate it, the push and pull between the professional organizations and the amateur organizations.
So picking up where you left off in discussing chapter 0 of the book, if Naismith is the founding father of the United States of Basketball, and his original rules are the constitution, then for the first fifty years or so the amateur and collegiate basketball organizations were sort of "constitutional originalists' who kept nudging the game back to what Naismith imagined (or more accurately, what they imagined Naismith imagined). For example, the YMCA's and the AAU never adopted the cage, outlawed double dribbling, tried to keep the game nonviolent, etc. And to push this crude analogy even further, during the same period the pro leagues would have believed in a "living consitution", a sort of free-market functionalism where regional oddities (no backboards in the Northeast) and functional innovations (dribbling, the pick and roll, the pivot man, etc. ) were all thrown together and either adopted, discarded, or refined through new rules by the organizational bodies in control at the time.
I have no idea where I was going with the last comment. I guess Phog Allen is Scalia and Marques Haynes is Ruth Bader Ginsburg?
BS: Bringing back the Constitutional analogy makes me wonder how it is that Naismith's rules can be fetishized, but the next five decades are this alien world that, somehow, spit out the NBL and BAA. With the exception of Prohibition, the Constitution is changed to account for some very linear notion of progress -- one that holds up to this day. This pre-history of the NBA is more like we now understand evolution to be: a series of random mutations that, through their interaction with the outside world, are streamlined and refined into adaptation. So whether we're talking about stylistic innovations, or changes the rules, the trial-and-error quality of this period doesn't mean it's negligible. We don't even have a situation like the ABA, where a lot of the craziness was external to the game. It's pretty clear that the instability, and occasional breakthroughs, in basketball during this time were directly tied to how topsy-turvy its circumstances were.
The idea of a non-linear history doesn't come naturally to us, because we're used to narrative. But it's probably closer to, you know, the way things really are. So in a way, it's good that we can't quite make sense of the early pro leagues and the barnstormers. Maybe we should be trying to bring that kind of perspective to the history that, in our minds, works out much more cleanly.
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 Style Points, or on Twitter @frazierapproves.
When Shoals asked me to write a style piece related to the re-release of Walt Frazier’s seminal Rockin' Steady: A Guide to Basketball and Cool, I jumped at the opportunity. Rockin’ Steady is, simply put, one of the oddest books I’ve ever read. Equal parts memoir, style guide, hoops tutorial and 70s PG scouting report, it is profoundly weird. Like "Keep Portland Weird", or that cow-camouflage-blazer-he-wore-a-few-weeks-ago weird.
Clyde’s basketball tips still ring true, because fundamentally, the game hasn’t changed that much since his day. Instead of focusing on the basketball portion of the book, I thought I’d see how much of Clyde’s 1974 closet would stand up in today’s league.
SUITS:
Clyde’s closet boasted 49. With the not-so-new dress code in effect, it would be surprising if most ballers didn’t have a similar number. While Rockin Steady doesn’t detail each and every suit (I’m sure most were conservative charcoal or navy worsteds), it does highlight some of the more, ahem Clyde-ish items. I was unable to locate any modern lamb or cowskin suits, but Andrew Bogut seems to be keeping Clyde’s white twill suit alive.
PANTS:
Clyde saw no problem with wearing his suits as separates. Wearing suit pants without the cost is a bad move because, ideally you’d like them to wear and age equally. It’s an especially bad move if, like Clyde, your pants have no pockets. After scouring the web for days, I came up short in my search for NBA players in verifiably pocketless trousers. Were I a betting man, I’d venture that one or more of the fits from Kobe’s infamous “white hot” spread would fit the bill.
KNOTS:
Circa 74, it seems that ties had fallen out of fashion. Ever a man of the times, Frazier purported to own no ties. This is incongruous with the photographic evidence presented in the book. From what I’ve seen, Frazier favored white silk ties with black suit/shirt combos. Gangster. Paul Pierce can be seen employing this particular look to questionable effect.
KICKS:
Shoes are dangerous. They’re a sartorial gateway drug. Every true clothes-horse has an even bigger shoe habit. Clyde was no exception. At the time of publication, he estimated that he had fifty pairs of shoes; 20 lace up and 30 loafers, mostly suede and leather, nach. One would expect that his shoe game would be relatively easy to export to into the new millennium; unfortunately, I was unable to find any pics of current players in 2.5 inch Cuban heels. I do, however, believe some college players wear them for on-campus pre-draft measurement.
COATS:
Endangered species laws and changing attitudes make it virtually impossible for a modern player to walk around in an elephant or seal skin coat like Clyde, but that didn’t stop Nate Robinson from stepping out in this full size Yeti-fur coat.
LIDS:
Walt wouldn’t have become Clyde without the hats. Frazier had a penchant for wearing wide brimmed hats before they became popular. After being ridiculed by veteran teammates, Frazier nearly abandoned the hats that gave him his now-iconic nickname. They called him Clyde because his hats were similar to those worn by Warren Beatty in Bonnie and Clyde.
Today, hats remain a sartorial power-move. They’re high degree of difficulty items that should only be attempted by the most accomplished Clydes of our day.
There will never be another Walt “Clyde” Frazier. So much of what made him has been lost. That time, that New York is long gone. The city isn’t edgy anymore. MSG doesn’t mean as much as it used to, and the days of weirdo fashion plates leading entertaining Knicks teams are long past.
First, the bad news. For those of those alien to Twitter, or undisposed toward general interest sports blog, FanHouse is no more. Actually, let me pause with the hysterics: It will live on, just with an almost entirely new staff, and under the direction of the Sporting News. Also, this transformation doesn't go down until March 1st, so you get another month and change of pedal-to-the-metal output.
Why is this all happening? As best as I can tell, AOL decided that its experiment -- hiring "national voice" columnists and sending out reporters with generous travel budgets, all in hopes of becoming a first-order content generator -- wasn't working out. There had always been some risk involved, but as I understood it, the plan was to be patient, and wait before passing judgment. Apparently, though, it was proving just too hairy a financial proposition. So rather than re-design the site so that more than two or three articles got traffic, or cut ties with some of the over-paid, under-performing "names" who ate up much of the payroll, AOL decided to cut their losses. They sold the reputable brand name, and the real estate, to a company in need of both.
So that's that. The Works will officially be no more, and Eric and myself will have a lot of time on our hands. Don't hesitate to get in touch if you know of any writing or editing work!
Speaking of which, I do have a few things lined up already. For one, I've begun contributing daily to Business Insider, writing about stuff like free agent strategy and branding. Crunching numbers has never been my strength, but everybody knows these things are much about quality as quantity, even if we're talking about the distribution of contracts.
***
Okay, the good news. Fast friend Yago Colás, whose Go Yago! is one of the rightful heirs to this long-in-the-tooth blog, has -- as some of you may have read elsewhere -- been using The Undisputed Guide as the primary textbook for his Cultures of Basketball course at Michigan. I'm hoping to make it out there some time this semester, but in the meantime, I'm limited to the fascinating, and somehow intrusive, practice of commenting on his posts about how The Undisputed Guide works in the classroom. I know I don't want to give too much unwelcome behind-the-scenes detail (or defense) of why the book is the way it is; nor do I think it's wholly constructive for me to, after the fact, drop in on Yago's classroom discussions like I know best.
For example, Yago explained to True Hoop that he liked the book's breakdown of historical periods. The funny thing is, Jacob and I came up with this schema and a compromise between the decades (works well enough, suits common sense) and an incredibly arcane system that had some epochs lasting only two or three years. So while I would like to claim some credit for this model, it's really just decades, but with enough tweaks thrown in to justify all the time we spent poring over these parameters. So, Yago, don't tell the kids that.
In his post on Day Two of class, Yago has the students read both Naismith's account of how he came up with basketball's rules, and FD's chapter on the game's invention. Naismith walks the reader through the reasoning that led to his original rules. In my chapter -- which owes a major, major assist to my agent Chris Parris-Lamb -- I tried to look at the different kinds of creation myths we can attribute to that reasoning. It was prompted by Jacob's observation that basketball was, unlike other sports, invented rather than evolved out of folkways. At the same time, what it means for a sport to come about in this way depends on what kind of meaning we wish to imbue it with.
Comparing Naismith to Moses, Martin Luther, the Founding Fathers, logical positivism, and Romanticism was over-the-top. But, in addition to giving some sense of the peculiar historical and cultural juncture at which this sport came into being, it also lent a framework to all the basketball history that would follow. Perhaps it's too much to think of Naismith as a visionary, but certainly, the rules he created carried within them the seed of all that followed. Basketball's history is not one of appropriation or strident interpretation. It evolved quickly, and there have certain been moments that qualify as revolutions. But one thing that always trips me up when I try and talk about the book, usually on the radio, is that basketball history is full of near-constant reinvention and repetition. You can say this over and over again, and it will never get any less true, or cringe-worthy: baseball may be the national pastime, but basketball is America.
Enough about me. Here's Yago:
At this point, I somehow forgot all about Naismith and the point of this whole comparative exercise, and, caught up in the testimony, just blurted out: “in what ways is basketball like or unlike a religion for you?” Here's where I should acknowledge that Shoals’ argument really goes from the mythico-religious (Moses) to the historico-religious (Martin Luther) to the secular (the Founding Fathers) and concludes that Naismith bears more of a resemblance to a founding father. So really the question should have been: "in what ways is basketball like a country to you?"
Ah, the perils of this exercise: I wish I could say I had this progression in mind, but really, i was thinking in terms of the different ways our culture has for accounting for revelation, true originality, or inspiration. All of these were present, and relevant, in the time of Naismith, can be read into basketball, and can be found in the sport today -- just as they can still found be discerned in culture. The discussion in his classroom of how basketball is or isn't like religion, and whether basketball deserves that level of fervor, leads back to the question not of how important basketball is. That's why it's instructive that, in his post, Yago suggests substituting "country" for religion. Religion, or the religious impulse (like there's only one kind; I included two modalities) is part of what we understand as America. If basketball contains one, or both of these -- and indeed, can be said to matter in all the ways that America grounds meaning -- than as far as sports go, it's kicking some serious ass.
***
By the time most of you read this, it will be MLK Day. There are NBA games on all day, even more than on Christmas, and I might hit up a regional high school tournament later in the evening. It's also low-hanging fruit for any columnists looking to approximate solemnity without exerting himself too much. The day is important, black people do more than play sports, etc. I have yet to see anyone attempt the more gymnastic opposite: that really, there is no more appropriate way to celebrate the life and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. than to play and watch basketball. I suppose, based on what I wrote above, I could be persuaded, but it sounds way too much like something a rightie shock jock might say for all the wrong reasons.
I will say this: on the local level, where basketball can work as a proxy for, or an extension of, community, I don't see what's wrong with it. The problem seems to come when the NBA, which traffics in blatant consumerism, tries to get in on the spirit. Then again, this is a league that makes teams play on Christmas and New Year's Eve. It's a federal and state holiday, which means people of all colors and creeds will have the day off, and be looking for things to do. Now, would the world be a better place if everyone -- after all, MLK Day isn't just about African-Americans doing right by themselves -- took the day off to volunteer, go to speeches and rallies, and otherwise carry on the tradition of the man whose name the date bears? Obviously. The truth is, though, that it's hard to get people to spend their day off doing things like that, no matter who they are. They want leisure, and the NBA gives them more product than usual to kick back with, or attend in person.
The pitfall comes in making an obligatory nod to the holiday. But that's nothing more than good corporate manners. That the NBA has to acknowledge MLK Day doesn't mean we have to accuse them of equating Civil Rights with today's pro sports leagues. Instead, we should blame ourselves for creating the demand, or at least the audience. No one's forcing us to watch basketball instead of going out and making the world a better place. If you do so on a regular basis, well, you deserve a day off.
Hello, all. While stumbling around the web, I found this phenomenal little paper by behavioral scientists, Emily M. Zitek and Alex Jordan, entitled, Anger, aggression, and athletics: Technical fouls predict performance outcomes in the NBA." From the abstract:
A dataset including all players from five consecutive National Basketball Association (NBA) seasons was analyzed to determine the relationship between displays of hostile aggression—as measured by the number of technical fouls a player received—and markers of successful performance. Analyses revealed that a greater number of technical fouls predicted success in aspects of the game that require power and energy, such as making field goals, grabbing rebounds, and blocking shots. However, a greater number of technical fouls was also associated with performance decrements in aspects of the game that require precision and carefulness, such as making three-pointers.
This paper harkens back to an idea I long ago discussed with resident statistician Silverbird 5000. We wondered why the best players in the league--this year Dwight Howard, Kobe Bryant, and Amare Stoudemire--consistently lead the league in technical fouls. Certainly their increased playing time contributes to this recurring phenomenon, but we speculated that even controlling for playing time, one would see that better players are called for more technicals. This could occur for a number of reasons--the increased salience of star players, the increased tendency of star players to beg for star treatment (and thus face consequences), or even a subconscious intuitive sense of justice that the refs feel toward punishing the players who are the most well to do.
Zitek and Jordan's article points to a link between on-court performance and techs, but points to a more nuanced relationship. First, they note that technical fouls constitute a special kind of aggression--hostile aggression (aggression for aggression's sake), rather than instrumental aggression (aggression that serves a particular goal in the sport like checking in hockey). The interesting finding is that although this form of aggression has no particular aim, it has adaptive consequences for success in the more energy-laden/rough-and-tumble aspects of basketball--getting to the line, rebounding, blocking shots, and overall field goal percentage. On the other hand, technical fouls had negative effects on the more finesse aspects of the game such as assists and three-point shooting. Note that the authors controlled for key factors in their analyses such as position of the player and minutes played.
The authors conclude that this form of hostile aggression allows players to maintain a level of high arousal necessary for the high-energy components of the game. All of which gives credence to one of the observations from our first book:
Of course, as the authors note, caution must be taken in interpreting too much from this correlational research. Still, it is nice to confirm what fans of high intensity players have always suspected--that there is a potential benefit to receiving technical fouls.
Here's Chris Webber talking about the microfracture experience (if you can call it that) during last night's unforgettable Kings-Nuggets event. Thanks to Sebastian for pulling the video.
"This is what I imagine JaVale McGee will look like in the dunk contest" - me "Now I know how Brandon Jennings will win this dunk contest" - Eric
Kyle from Truth About It hipped me to these -- he was working on a truly massive, admirable post on the lost 1977 contest, and had some questions. I responded with "I remember reading about this", and drooled over this video for about five years. If you want to see my early thoughts on this year's field, here I am. Katz has compiled video previews. I failed, though, to stress enough that I really envision McGee experiencing some sort of centrifugal mishap and being torn limb-from-limb like Rabbi Akiba.
I woke up this morning and asked myself if this wasn't a totally new dunk contest paradigm: no swingmen, three big men when every one of those other than Dwight Howard has failed to impress (I never liked him much in the contest, either), and the wild card/sidekick in Brandon Jennings who is there only to entertain. That DeAndre Jordan, not DeMar DeRozan, seems like the biggest snub tells you something about the direction this group of competitors signals. I'm not sure exactly what the aim is -- get back to me after we see how it pans out -- but this represents a clean break with the past. Embracing the misfits and introducing a clear element of absurdity. Or maybe focusing on new kinds on weaponry. Whatever, when the dunk contest matters, it's as central to the culture of the sport as any non-playoff game. We look to it year after year because inside, something's been missing for a long time.
I now want to turn my attentions to a more serious topic: the Ted Williams story that has all the country aflutter. First, let's get one thing out of the way: some part of me will never stop laughing from reading a "Cavs Hire Homeless Internet Sensation" headline on my phone while still in bed. Sorry dudes, that's how it is. Also, for Williams, this is great. Obviously. I know nothing about him, but when a guy goes from nothing to something overnight, and finds his life back on track when he thought he was done for ... well, that's when I write sentences like that. And the more I think about, the more insidious, and just plain manipulative, it seems.
For one, the whole notion of random, unicorns-and-rainbows charity administered in a state with really, really serious job shortages and foreclosure plague (how are drug sales these days? I'm guessing no one can afford it) is kind of insensitive. Maybe even crass. I understand that Williams is a decent guy who is very deserving of a fresh start. But come on ... it wouldn't make more sense, as something other than a publicity stunt, to spread the charity around a little? I know, this also lands the Cavs and others a valuable employee (job creation!), so it's not pure altrusim. And yes, they are paying him -- he's working for his! Still, though, if you want me to feel like the world is a better, kinder place for this, well, it takes more than a one-off stunt. Making dreams come true isn't the same thing as affecting change, obviously, but at least we can ask for action that falls somewhere in between the two. It's the only remotely sane, responsible thing to do in this day and age.
And, while all this is great for Williams, there's something too Hollywood about this that seems a little unfair. He's not the only homeless dude with marketable skills, or a hard luck story that at one point, showed real promise. Especially -- not to sound like a broken record -- in this economic climate, in places (like Ohio) where jobs and homes can no longer be taken for granted. I guess now everyone can dream of being discovered by viral video, or stake all their future hopes on the Internet. Except then, don't we just have the homeless version of inner city kids trying to make the NBA? This isn't proof that America still makes it happen -- it's yet another gross distortion of the American Dream (whatever that is), pushed to such a clown-ish extreme that it replaces the social safety net with a fucking game show.
I'm also not entirely convinced that this kind of instant-fix is a recipe for lasting stability. Recovery and the transition back into polite society isn't like flipping a switch. Not saying we should punish anyone, but again, everybody knows that overnight success is rarely the foundation for a strong and constant future. Finally, never underestimate Dan Gilbert. He roused a lynch-mob against LeBron to keep the Cavs brand in the headlines and remotely relevant; when that inconvenient team got in the way, he had to pivot, and become a saint. Who knows what's next? It's not like they have anything to lose as an organization.
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