Positive Uncertainty

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.

The First Shall Be Last

Read today's Works even if you have a problem with certain other FanHouse material. It's about LeBron and race and sure to get some real howlers in the comments section. Okay, now that we've settled that ... time for some football!

I got back into basketball pretty organically. It just sort of happened one summer. Once it took over my life, it wasn't long before I wanted -- or saw that it made sense to be -- a generalist. Year-round sports, more material to mine, and the ability to hold my own in any basketball convo that, you know, veered off into another pastime. Comparisons are the devil, but if it weren't for parallels, life would have no movement to it. If I'm being totally honest, and tired, I'll have you know that the rush of fantasy sports had something to do with it, too. But I was lazy, uninspired, and it didn't stick. I don't think I got that every sport was special in its own way -- perhaps too special.

My brother, bless his soul, gives me shit for saying that I miss the NFL of eight years ago. He's a Steelers fan, which might be part of the problem, but really, I'm saying that I hate platoons and love dominant players with staying power. Even if the league is less that way than it used to be, still, that inclination shows that I never really got it to begin with.

That said, I've somehow started watching football again. I don't even know what I think about, or look for, on Sunday this season. I guess that's called learning, or humility. Who knows, maybe I will eventually form a coherent FD doctrine for the NFL -- if that's not an oxymoron. The reason this matters, though, is that it's more than a fraught narrative than Michael Vick is now the starter in Philly. Let's get this out of the way: Vick did a terrible, indefensible thing, even if you point out that he's hardly the Great Man of organized dog fighting. Talk about the banality of evil; I think that Vick's maturation as a football player is far more revealing than his so-called dark side. That's dull agency, further proof that people are at their worst when they work together mindlessly in groups, pressuring each other and softened up enough to be influenced by the world around them.

I am not sure what the implications of that theory are for sport in general, and any particular sport, so I'll leave it to someone else to go there.

Anyway, Vick was pure 2002. I used to base my travel schedule around nationally-televised games of his. His return last season, as wildcat wild card (is that redundant?), was totally 2002, at least as I remembered that time. That it was with the Eagles made the flashback personal to me, since I lived in Philly at that time. And, as such, I couldn't help but see a faint parallel with Allen Iverson -- who, coincidentally, was making his own abortive comeback with the Sixers as Vick's post-jail career began.



Allen Iverson never killed any dogs, spent time locked up that he actually deserved, or otherwise violated the public trust like Michael Vick has. AI probably would have enjoyed a far more quiet reputation if he had developed a taste for online roulette games or an online blackjack game. There's the crucial difference between the two. But at the dawn of the 21st century, these two products of VA's Tidewater area were the baddest thing going in their respective sports. Iverson's revolution was more cultural than basketballular, and Vick's dynamism on the field wasn't so explicitly linked to some sort of "hip-hop moment" in football. That's also probably why Vick had an easier time getting endorsements. Still, the two players were both positively enthralling and utterly maddening, rare talents with tools out the wazoo who, depending on how you saw it, pointed toward the future or just refused to embrace The Right Way. Oh, and in case you're a total moron, both signified race so loud you could hear it a mile away. Vick was the quintessential "black quarterback", and Iverson was, well, Iverson.

And Philly was, well, Philly. Race in Philly was, well, race in Philly. If you need a primer on that city's complicated relationship with the Answer; prepare to spend a day combing through old Inky columns. Vick was only peripherally related to this discussion, in the sense that McNabb was in the process of trying to change his game -- away from multi-dimensional threat that Vick took to a ludicrous extreme. When the Eagles beat the Falcons in the 2003 playoffs (after Atlanta's upset of Green Bay at Lambeau), it felt like a vindication of McNabb's development. Insert race and style as necessary here.

That Lambeau win was Vick's high watermark as a pro, the rough equivalent of the Sixers' 2001 victory over the Lakers in the Finals. He did it his way, and however fleetingly, bore truly grandiose results. Actually, that MVP year for Iverson was a lot like Vick's 2002, the season when, if he didn't "put it all together", at least he made believers of us all. Even if we knew we would crash sooner rather than later.

Now Vick is back, a changed player and one would guess, a changed man. In Philly, the same city that bickered over Iverson for a decade. The cultural baggage of it all is enough to make your nose fall off. Not to mention the sentimental lure of seeing Vick back in action, felony or no felony. What seems key to me, though, and why I started with my own passive return to the NFL, is that Vick's no longer the kind of boom-and-bust player who keeps passions high. But that makes him -- dare I say -- an inspirational figure instead of a looming outlaw. For the sake of his professional future, and his aging body, he's a combination of wiser and diminished. Come to think of it, he's living out Donavon McNabb all over again. Except, of course, with higher stakes, far more tension in the air, and a better white back-up for talk radio to clamor over.

Vocals First, Drums Later

Here at FreeDarko, we're all about weird stuff no one knows or cares about, even though they should. That's why I want to talk about the latest Old Spice ad, featuring Ray Lewis. Actually, I don't want to talk about the campaign, or Lewis (although it's amazing he never won an MVP). I'm amazed at how much this resembles the best kind of work Wieden+Kennedy used to do for Nike. Then that stopped; players wanted to be taken seriously, Jordan cast a long shadow even in retirement, the NBA had an image problem, and there simply wasn't space for either fun or mischief. Even those Roswell Rayguns ads haven't aged so well. But here we have Ray Lewis, an older athlete who no one associates with playfulness, from a sport known as the No Fun League, in a truly bizarre spot that even makes a gratuitous, if compelling, one-line commentary on fantasy sports. The whole commercial becomes that for one second, in fact, and then it's back to the fun house.

Yes, I know that all this going against the grain might be exactly why this ad was possible, and part of why it works so well -- and would work in far clumsier hands. However, the irony is that, with Ray Lewis and football as premise, or the foundation, W+K are able to simply port in the kind of ad we once might have seen from Nike. Note: "The LeBrons" or the "Book of Dimes" are among the last spots in this tradition, before James's ads set out simply to prove that he wasn't a clown. We've been down this road a million times: Advertising with personality helps the NBA, whether or not the people in charge realize this. The Hyperize joint was an encouraging sign. Still, seeing an athlete used like this and have it be a football player -- much less advertise basketball products -- is a real bummer. It's the medical marijuana, or struck-down Prop 8, of a great advertising tradition.

Semi-related and probably deserving more space: There's a misconception floating around that FD likes underdogs. We don't. We like star players, weird players, and players who aren't afraid to be candid. We are also huge snobs who all cut our teeth in various realms of music snobbery. When players we jock, like Julian Wright, turn out to suck, it's an embarrassment. We're looking to catch the next big thing before you do, celebrate the unjustly ignored forces, or pick up on the glorious outliers who just might sneak in and transform the sport in small ways. We love potential. But potential, as it should be, is a burden -- for players in real life, and in terms of the way this blog views them. We don't root for lesser souls; we're all about those who deserve to be, or become, something rare and cunning. A screw-up or drop-out isn't FD, he's the antithesis of it. This isn't Slackerball, it's about making sure we're up on the best the league has to offer. J.R. Smith? He's not a patron saint, he's the prodigal son.

Fly Through All Ears

Yes, we’re back. It was only Dan that left the country for a week, but still, now the show is back.



Dan checks back in with Ken, and they talk a little trade action. Then Dan does something that’s never been done on this show.

In the next segment, Dan talks with Josh Levin, of Slate.com, writer and host of the Hang Up and Listen podcast. Josh is originally from New Orleans, which gave them a chance to talk about the sports scene there (Super Bowl relevant!) as well as the Hornets (NBA Podcast relevant!)

We’ll be honest, there’s some static-y noise in the talk with Josh. We did the best we could about it. It’s probably Ken’s fault.

Songs from the episode:

“Come On Feet” - Quasimoto
“All Tomorrow’s Linoleum” - Autechre
“Perception” - Kylesa
“Ease Back” - The Meters
“The Saints Are Coming” - The Skids

Subscribe via iTunes, whydontya?

No Peace in Fate

When Sean Taylor was murdered, a handful of folks typing about sports insisted that his rowdy past had played a role. Whether this was racism, immaturity or irresponsibility on their part end up mattering not. As soon as the police sunk their teeth into an investigation, the random nature of the crime became apparent.

Chris Henry passed away this morning. From his lengthy rap sheet, litany of suspensions, and career full of false starts, you might think Henry was just another defiant thug. But Henry was something far darker: A young man in grips of self-destruction from the day he entered the league; an immense talent who could often convince you he was the best receiver on the Bengals; and, by all accounts, a nice guy that the team simply refused to give up on. I spent last night reloading Twitter over and over again, which was both disturbing and strangely uplifting. This morning, when Henry's death was announced and the search went crazy, I was stunned at how many people professed a lack of surprise. Nothing makes me more judgmental than the internet. But then I thought about it and realized that, as unlikely an ending as it was, it wasn't just that Henry had been struggling against forces trying to drag him down since college, and that such things rarely end well. It was that, as with Eddie Griffin's grisly demise, the strangeness, excess, and whole miserable situation that surrounds it, this was exactly the kind of thing that would happen to Henry.

Chris Henry was always one of my favorites. He also, like Griffin, belonged to that rare category of truly troubled pros, guys whose run-ins with the law could be sad, even comical. There was nothing angry or threatening about him. Henry was just a sublime athlete who was terrible at being alive. Maybe being an NFL player made it worse; maybe it was true that his kids and impending marriage had helped him turn his life around. He was only 26. But, at the risk of sounding like a total jerk, it's hard to feel like all was well when it imploded so quickly, and with such disastrous results.

In the beginning, I badly wanted to see Henry fulfill his potential, start for the high-octane Bengals, and give me the chance to see him glide into the end zone on a regular basis. Palmer always did seem to look for him. Then, I was content with a big play every few weeks. At some point, that shifted to hoping he'd get to stick in the league. I haven't watched much football this year, but when I heard the first Henry news, I immediately started wondering if this meant his career was over. That quickly morphed into hoping he wasn't paralyzed. Then, that he wasn't going to have serious brain damage, or stay in a coma indefinitely. That was how it was with Henry. He kept us hanging on, rooting for him and utterly sympathetic, even as the gravity dragging him down got steeper and steeper.

Scream All Day

This will totally shock all of you: The still-untitled FreeDarko Book 2 will at one point address some "could've been" players. I had called them "what if's," but not only does that encompass much more, it also overlaps with the Simmons tome—one of my great anxieties about the project. The last thing I want to do is look like I'm ripping off another colorful NBA history book that came out one year before ours.

Last night, as I inexplicably watched the World Series over Lakers/Hawks, I struggled to come up with the perfect characterization of that kind of player. Then it turned into a model, so I decided to scrap it and make it a blog post, not in the least because it could use some copious reader input. I think they call it open source, or cheating. First, though, some glimmers from the NBA I caught last night: I fear the Lakers will win it all with Bynum as rampaging dinosaur and Artest and Odom used as unimaginatively as possible. The Blazers really bum me out, especially Aldridge. Blatche is the original Anthony Randolph. Stop comparing Oscar Robertson to LeBron, Robertson was a better mid-period Kidd with scoring genes (that was all Ziller). Ozzie Guillen's pre-game commentary shows you why Kevin Garnett will never be part of a studio crew.

But back to the problem that really bugged me. We all know that there exist players we say "if only" about. For one, there's two kind: Those that drive us insane when they're around, and assume the glow of exceptionalism once they've retired. That's due in large part to the fact that 99.99999% of these players have problems with injuries, which we've learned to hate the victim for, or fuck up personally, which just gets really old really fast (at least if you're trying to argue for their hypothetical place among the game's elite). Beyond that, there's the more complicated matter of what kind of legacy we're going off of. What I haven't figure out yet is whether, in the end, we view all these types the same way—many paths to the same honorary status—or the kind of career a player manages to have in fact decides how real, extravagant, or wishful our projections for them end up being. I also really want someone to tell me if certain of these scenarios are more common to one sport, or position, than others.

After much handwringing and chatting, I arrived at the following four categories, which for now lack snappy names:

1. Guys who, when all is said and done, somehow convince us they'd had an actual career. This one is startlingly subjective: Sandy Koufax, Gale Sayers, and Bill Walton all belong here even though each had a very different arc as a player. Maybe "non-player" is more appropriate. This is kind who make the Hall of Fame without anyone making a fuss.

2. One step below that, we have players who strung together several seasons of stardom, but either not to a degree, or without enough distinction, to elevate them to the top category. Sometimes, it's just a matter of us being unable to get over how incomplete their place in history seems; they're a strange mix of conjecture and actuality that's its own kind of purgatory. I put Pete Reiser and Maurice Stokes here; Stokes is HOF but it's largely sentimental.

3. Total flashes-in-the-pan, one-year wonders who sustain nothing but suggest multitudes. Herb Score goes here, as does Mark Prior. These are the real darlings of the "could've been" fetishists, at least those with the most preposterously Romantic streaks; that because Category #2 is generally classified as "tragic."

4. Pure potential. Never really got a chance for those initial assessments to be proven wrong. Len Bias is the obvious, and most extreme, example here. Ernie Davis. Shaun Livingston probably fits, as well.

With that, I open up the floor for discussion. Add names, critique the framework, give a sport-specific analysis. It's like a Wiki with the head cut off. Or the tail, maybe.

The Power of Myth

Ever since we used to write for McSweeney's, I haven't been able to break the habit of considering every basketball-related thought I have in the context of other sports. Particularly in 2009, one thought has come up over and over again, which is the degree to which the NBA completely pales in comparison to the NFL and MLB in terms of its capacity to sustain myth-making.

I started thinking about this when the David Ortiz steroid allegations came to light coinciding almost perfectly with me moving to Boston. First we saw Shoeless Joe-meets-Hugh Grant levels of disbelief. Cities burned, babies cried. America had a punctured ventricle. Then, just as quick as the World Trade Center of baseball came down, majestic eagles rebuilt a monument to pride and greatness. Ortiz went on a tear for a few months, he went John McCain on other potential steroid users--"I will make them famous and you will know their names!"--and then gets cheered into the playoffs, along with A-Rod, Andy Pettite, Manny Ramirez and the rest of the dopers.

Guys like Manny and Papi are Pecos Bill and John Henry. They are myths, denied the inner lives of human beings, and manufactured into suprahuman symbols of physical majesty. The questions have stopped, the steroid biz completely forgotten until (maybe) these guys are long retired and it's hall of fame voting time. We don't really know much about their pasts or what they do on their off days. They don't Twitter. And given their past post-season heroics, they are squarely in the category of legend, rather than celebrity. The MLB is full of guys like this: grizzled white dudes like Mark Buehrle, they-came-from-nowhere Latinos, Miyagi-esque Asians like Ichiro, Jimmy Rollins, fan favorites like Torii Hunter...these are men, made into myths.

As I watch Brett Favre every Sunday (as now I am contractually obligated to do as a Vikings fan--NO LIBERATED FANDOM FOR OTHER SPORTS), the parallel becomes clear for football. There are a whole slew of mystical apparitions--Favre, Brady, and Ray Lewis among them. Guys that simply have a whole bunch of games under their belt, like Jon Runyan or Steve Hutchinson, are in there as well. And skill players like Randy Moss or LaDanian Tomlinson also have attained myth status for various memorable single-game performances. I suppose Monday Night Football and the ritual of SUNDAY helps sustain the game's spiritual character, but--and you see where I'm going with this--I'm always left wondering why the NBA is lacking so much in terms of creating and sustaining myth.























A few theories:

--A huge part of myth is the mystery surrounding one's creation. Baseball is chock full of great foreign players, the pasts of whom are much more unknown: I have no idea what Vladimir Guerrero or Magglio Ordonez' life was like in Latin America. Both the NFL and MLB rely more on OLD players, guys who succeed well into their late 30s, and sometimes even 40s. These guys are pre-Internet. There simply wasn't as much access to the lives of guys who started their careers in the late 80s or early 90s. The NBA, by comparison is a younger sport. The best guys are the new generation. Every single rookie has a Twitter account. We know where they came from and what they're doing. Even the league's elder statesman, Shaq, is also the king of Twitter, and has goofballed his way our of holding any mythical cred.

--The NBA utilizes history incorrectly. The NFL creates history on the go--every WEEK some record is being set (think about how many times in the past few years, you've heard the term "longest play in NFL history"), and they shove down our throat meaningless statistics about the "Monday Night Record for X" or the first time on Thanksgiving a runningback has both ran and thrown for a first down. The MLB markets itself well in this regard as well. October gets special special treatment, the playoffs are also more well-rooted in American history, so they are already have a touch of built-in nostalgia. By contrast, the NBA's past overshadows its present. The lig's two best players, LeBron and Kboe, are forever cast in Jordan's shadow. Jordan is myth, Kobe and Bron are simply scholars of his work.

--We always champion the NBA as the one league where you get to see guys without facemasks, up close on the court, virtually in the flesh. This gives the game a sense of immediacy that you simply don't get with any other sport. I'm starting to wonder, however, if this close distance might be too much of a good thing. We know these guys too personally, and it inhibits us from knowing them eternally.

Thoughts? Disagreement? Anybody care?

The Nothingness Is Lovely

By now, you should know Joey [classified Jew name]. He writes for FD on occasion, is responsible for the ever-excellent Straight Bangin', and this week was a guest on the FD/DoC podcast. He also really likes The Hills, which figures prominently in a long interview I did with Eugene for his "The People You Don't Know" podcast. It will either make you love or hate me more than ever, or maybe send me sympathy ribbons.

Growing up in a household bereft of prescribed bedtimes or limits on television, and one where knowledge of all kinds remains the leading currency, I developed a “talent” about which most parents wouldn’t normally brag to others. But on more than just a few occasions, my parents would smile with this weird, proud amusement as they told other people that, “Joe stays up so late and likes sports so much that he can watch the same SportsCenter three or four times a day.”

That Joe--he really knows how to use his time well.

My neuroses aside, I summon this memory because it reinforces two related things: 1) I consume a lot of sports media; 2) I still have no clue as to what the NFL Draft is supposed to be about. Every year, I am left feeling the same way--the most misleading weekend in sports is that of the NFL Draft, because, honestly, it seems to be about everything but the actual sport that it nourishes. It strikes me as even more bizarre when it is juxtaposed against the NBA Draft. The NBA Draft is fun. The NFL Draft? Not really. The NBA Draft reflects the fluidity of basketball: point forwards, flex offenses, and “we like his athleticism so we took him.” The NFL Draft, meanwhile, reflects the rigidity of football: set positions, arcane formation rules, and “signability.” To be honest, it sucks.



First, think about the NBA Draft. No, wait. First, let us just get this out of the way: yes, the NBA Draft is an event, or a process, really, riddled with problems. As Hubie might warmly acknowledge, “We know this. OK?” You’re right, teams can make horrible decisions. They seem to emphasize nebulous notions of potential to the preclusion of rational thought. They ignore known entities to roll the proverbial dice on only partially formed athletes who can’t shoot but can move in multiple directions once airborne. They confuse priorities, they overly rely on individual workouts, they insist that kids who don’t care about college attend it for a year--we know all of this. ESPN even has the temerity to post graphics that say things like, “Needs to Improve: Athleticism,” as though you can just buy some at a flea market. The whole thing can lend itself to easy lampoon.

The NBA Draft is undeniably about playing basketball, though, and that redeems it. A sports fan can see this. (A sports fan stupid enough to watch Charley Steiner and Mike Patrick on a loop can see this over and over again.) The way it’s covered, the way it’s structured, the culture that surrounds it--basketball is the thing. More precisely, the focus never moves away from the on-court product, wrongly landing on the draft process, itself. Columnists and reporters frame the draft by highlighting what teams need to improve. There are pre-draft camps where prospects--brace yourselves--play the sport! Teams evaluate their needs and the available talent with immediacy. The idea is usually that the right player can make a meaningful difference, and the priority is finding the best basketball fit. Again, you can fairly criticize how these evaluations are made and where they net out, but it’s hard to impugn the motives behind them. Everything about the draft carries this air of renewal; everything acknowledges that improving the basketball is paramount.

Not unimportant, I should reiterate that the tone of the entire institution is optimistic: from the workouts, to the assessment of needs, to the handshakes with Commissioner Stern, the draft encompasses positivity about the game. Everyone is the next someone, and that someone to whom a given player is compared is rarely any old humdrum player. Parallels are drawn in the sun, with the glow of hope brightening prognostications. Further, front-office personnel, players, and fans are allowed, if not encouraged, to have fun with the whole thing. It is uncommon for a team to draft someone and foster an ensuing dialogue that bemoans how little things will change. There is a baseline understanding that the team is likely to become more competitive, even if a given draft cannot fully satisfy all needs. Enthusiasm is no stranger to the NBA Draft, and no one seems to be bothered by this. Heaven forbid that we enjoy ourselves while celebrating a game.



The NFL draft may be fundamentally about all of this, too. I’ll be fair and allow that this may be the case. Those yahoo Jets fans who show up certainly are into it. Nor will I deny that the denizens of America’s favorite gambling habit surely want to find the safety required to win a Super Bowl and help their fans feel the excitement that should come with successfully executing this search. But…it certainly doesn’t seem that way to an outsider who is very much attuned to sports culture. Instead, everything about the NFL Draft feels different: the way it's discussed, the way it’s administered, the way it’s approached by its participants. In patriotic, nationally aggrandizing Cold War terms, the NBA Draft feels like America--cheerful, excited, warm--while the NFL Draft feels like the Soviet Union--stern, severe, cold. Put another way, which event’s tenor would best accommodate Ronald Reagan eating his jellybeans and smiling with his vacant veneer of senility, and which would better serve Nikita Khrushchev as he pounded his shoe on a desk? That’s what I thought.

Peter King wrote a column this week that captures so many of these differences. Trumpeting that the Detroit Lions, picking first, will focus on "signability" when making their choice next weekend, King easily rattles off 1,000 words about how the Lions will sort out whom they draft. It’s Peter King, so it’s overly moralistic and very much written by a middle-aged white guy from New Jersey knowledgeable NFL writing, but, strikingly, it has so little to do with football. Instead, it’s about business strategy; it’s about what the Lions are supposed to pay a top pick; it’s about a historical analysis of “what happens in the draft,” so to speak. King’s story presumes a certain kind of draft formalism that not only shifts its natural focus--shouldn’t it be about improving how the Lions play football?--but also illustrates what the NFL Draft is really about, namely the theater of “playing draft.” Football is almost secondary, and that’s neither fun nor sports, really.

Before we go on, I’ll again attempt to be fair: Maybe another team coming off a historic failure wouldn’t focus on “signability,” and instead would try to get the single best player. This could be a problem with the Lions (entirely possible), and not with the NFL. Further, the NBA doesn’t contend with signing drama because it has a rookie salary cap, so this could be an apples-to-oranges comparison. However, the NFL salary structure is fairly rigid, albeit non-codified, and the variations from year to year are not so vast. Were they, professional draft blowhards like Mel Kiper, Jr.--something else that, thankfully, sets the NBA and NFL apart--couldn’t shriek with such certainty about which players deserve “fourth-pick money” and which picks are good values. It wouldn’t make sense if everyone didn’t already know the stakes.



You can likely sense my skepticism that the absent rookie salary cap is the dispositive issue that separates the NFL Draft from its NBA superior. I am similarly skeptical (read: convinced in the opposite) that only the Lions would be choosing a top pick using actuary tables because, well, we go through this every year. It’s seemingly always about factors that are not directly connected to who runs faster, hits harder, and, ultimately, wins more. I don’t suggest that NFL teams don’t want to play better football. Rather, I’d argue that this unavoidable imperative, somehow, gets lost in the draft process itself. Not really a “sports” weekend, the NFL Draft has taken on this weird, meta component that seems to fuck up the thinking and the dialogue. The football draft is treated like a series of business transactions, and teams appear to lose sight of just picking the players who will make them best at playing football. NFL teams come off as more preoccupied with "drafting the right way," or carrying out some process preserved for its own sake, rather than the foundational issue of just improving the team. (For now, we’ll leave aside the much, much larger conversation about sports as business, which I acknowledge renders this post an incomplete exploration. I am OK with that.)

That’s not fun. Nothing about this ritualism is fun. It’s weird, and frankly annoying, that as early as February, people seriously argue about who the Seahawks should draft. Similarly, there is something nonsensical and antiseptic about the premier pre-draft event comprising Wonderlic tests, World’s Strongest Man simulations, and seemingly everything but actually playing football. The entire ordeal--and that’s what it is--feels insincere and disconnected from the sport.



Instead, the NFL Draft, not in organic harmony with the sport itself, seems to most directly connect to the larger NFL Industrial Complex that enjoys a suffocatingly tight grip on America. Everything about the NFL is taken oh so seriously, and discussed with such synthetic urgency and significance, that actual football is almost a secondary concern. Violence and primal physical competition may forever hold sway over the imagination of humanity, resulting in an evergreen appeal for the sport, but the Business of the NFL obscures this simple, innate appeal. It’s like when you apply too much dressing and drown out the natural flavors originally meant to be enhanced. Far from a compulsory exercise meant to showcase the product, improve how it’s played, and preserve the latent appeal of sport--a description which I’d ascribe to the NBA Draft as a compliment--the NFL Draft is its own industry, in effect. The draft is just about the NFL--the crest, those beer commercials, all that tailgating, and everything else that was once an attendant circumstance and now an equal to the football.

That is not really sports. That is marketing, or popular culture, even. The Masters, the Final Four, the divisional football playoff games--those are sports weekends. Those are mirthful, exciting opportunities to celebrate sports. As is the NBA Draft, a process that never loses sight of basketball, of the NBA’s loose rhythm, or the hope of the offseason. The NFL Draft, on the other hand, is an event that’s not really about sports. It’s about itself, and the self-involved seriousness of the NFL. Football becomes almost incidental as the NFL Draft drones on, polluting a perfectly innocent spring weekend with consternation about tenths-of-a-second differences, stern treatment of depth chart minutiae, and self-righteous indignation arising when teams “get it wrong.” As though the goal is to draft a certain way, not win more games.

As I said before, that sucks.

Land Before Time: 2 Football

Wednesday's football flashback was only the beginning. Here you have the apex and the end of this phase in pre-Darko. Click on it to magnify and read. One time at a party in Philly, some guy told me he'd had this work blown up and framed for his living room. I had to rip this out of my only copy to scan it, thus possibly destroying my memorable essay on Their Satanic Majesties Request.

Don't forget to read this oath from yesterday, or my surprisingly wild interview with Clyde Drexler. And to dude who told me at Varsity Letters about his series of DIY All-Star songs, PLEASE GET IN TOUCH!!!!