You Get What You Pay With

Read this first. It's all about structural change and Los Suns and brings you up-to-date on me on this.

However, sometimes, you write a line that's embarrassing, and then your friend writes something more thoughtful about it, and then you have to correct for the heat of the moment. "Fuck Phil Jackson" should have been "Phil Jackson is being cranky, dismissive, rude, and very predictably Boomer-ish." Eric Freeman had another stance: Phil is a hypocrite, since those books he gives everyone couldn't just be taken as lessons in basketball.

Upon further reflection, I've hit on The Secret of Phil Jackson: the secret is that Phil Jackson is only about basketball. We generally assume, as Eric did, that once sports get abstracted or intellectualized enough, it transcends itself and enters into dialogue with all other spheres of human knowledge. However, just as there are smart people who like sports because they provide refuge from figuring out the universe, there are figures like Phil who are, in effect, meaningful only as basketball thinkers. They may draw on other perspectives or methods, but that's not the same as equating sports with Zen or Bolano. Sports will not save you or society; they can just be approached with similar rigor.

It's not so different from applying the scientific method to being a chef, which I believe is called molecular gastronomy, or philosophy PhDs going to work for corporations. To presume a bleeding between all things is almost laughably modern. Get with the century.

The biggest proof I have here that Phil is being flippant or uninterested, not taking some kind of principled stance? He's outright dismissive of the question, even the issue. He hasn't done his research, and takes the same tone he always does when he feels like being a dick. If Jackson was really as deep, thoughtful, or political (pick your imagined compliment) about the non-basketball world as we suppose him to be, he would presumably have a better response. Instead, there's no difference between him and a commenter on AOL or Yahoo!.

Adande asked him about, and many have pointed to—if nothing else, as Eric did, as proof of hypocrisy—his sideline support for Bill Bradley. Guess what? Bradley was an old friend who, while liberal, was a mainstream candidate for President. It wasn't any great feat of will or imagination. It wasn't the world basketball gave him.