You Can See Your Own Reflection

You heard it everywhere but here first: new FDPDOC podcast went up yesterday. One of these, I'll make a triumphant return to those parts. Be reading my Playoff Talking Points. And below, check out these images sent to me for purposes of sharing (via bobarke/champions)

Guest Lecture: All This (Rocket) Science I Don't Understand

Today’s FD guest lecturer is Chi Tung, a man who may or may not refer to himself as the Chinese Stallion (after all, it is what his name means). When he’s not wearing lensless glasses for a tech show on state-run Chinese television, he moonlights as a writer, for publications ranging from the Huffpo to Asia Pacific Arts.

Now that the 2009 Houston Rockets have bowed out for good (bless their scrappy hearts), it’s as good a time as any to turn down all that red glare, and understand what actually matters. There will be talk of caging and uncaging the pitbull that is Ron-ron, whether the collective talents of Lowry/Brooks are lesser or greater than the parts of their sum, and of course, T-mac’s further descent into the abyss. But all that pales in comparison to the made-for-Beyond-the-Glory (as directed by Werner Herzog) trajectory of one Yao Ming, and his newfound FD-ness.

Prior to these playoffs, Yao had yet to have a truly defining NBA moment—at least, not one that didn’t end in head-shaking ignominy (see: Robinson, Nate). Redemption, then, has been thrice as nice to him in ’09—the flawless shooting exhibition he put on in a game-one dismantling of the Blazers that caused them to rejigger their entire defensive gameplan; the gutsy fourth-quarter points he notched against the Lakers in Game One after a near-catastrophic collision with Kobe; and the outright refusal to leave Game Three when he was noticeably limping and would later be diagnosed with a broken foot. Again.



On paper, these images lack the naked transcendence of a Lebron buzzer beater, or the basketball-is-hip-hop undressing of Tyronn Lue in the wake of an AI crossover. But they’re important nonetheless—because mythmaking relies as much on the power of perception as it does shock-and-awe. Pundits and bloggers alike tend to talk about Yao’s accomplishments like they’re being asked to pen a hagiography—as if being compelled to assume the role of China’s sacrificial lamb-cum-cash-cow has earned him a lifetime of faint, backhanded praise. Under their breath, though, there’s more than a whiff of denigration: what kind of dominant big man doesn’t dunk the ball with malice, they ask? Or put his imprint on games by demanding the ball more often? Or, in so many words, tell the Chinese government to step the eff off so his achy-breaky feet can heal properly?

In isolation, these mutterings sound like provocations made by Right Way absolutists. But the things you hear in China are equally problematic, albeit for entirely different reasons. The other day, I offhandedly remarked to one of my Chinese colleagues that though it’s a damn shame about Yao’s latest injury, it’s some consolation to see him getting recognition from the MSM as a tough, resilient sonofabitch. His response? That in many ways, Yao has always been the quintessential Chinese male—he has big, brass balls, but doesn’t feel the need to tell you about them, a la Sam Cassell. It’s just one of many instances where Yao-as-cultural-trope trumps Yao-as-basketball-player. And one of many instances where Americans and Chinese alike fail to appreciate the true essence of Yao.



Liberated fandom allows us to root for who we want, in the ways that we want, largely because of our desire to claim ownership over a certain value or aesthetic. But in China, the who and the how take a backseat to the just-is. One could argue that Chinese fandom is inherently liberated in ways that Chinese politics—and American fandom—are not. Without the self-reflexiveness that comes part and parcel with Americanness, Kobe just is someone who makes the game look absurdly easy and fun, not a lightning rod for varying definitions of greatness. NBA player jerseys are worn unironically and with little regard for street cred—hence, the inexplicable popularity of Shane Battier. Even Chinese fandom, as it relates to domestic pro clubs, seems curiously anachronistic—rather than drawing upon clearly defined geographical lines, it functions more like club soccer on a smaller scale. Mercenaries carry little stigma because so little is at stake—replace the name Cristiano Ronaldo with Bonzi Wells, and you’ll understand why.

And yet, through all of it, Yao remains—he has all the responsibilities of a national monolith, but none of its perks. In other words, Chinese people may look to him for inspiration, but rarely can they articulate what they intend to do about it. Part of that is due to the building-castles-in-the-sand nature of globalization. In basketball parlance, it’s like seeing the torch-passing from Yao to Yi as a sweeping, old-school-to-new-school progression, and swearing it’s only a matter of time before China’s own version of Ricky Rubio is releasing mixtapes during the offseason.

I’ve beaten this drum before on my Huffpo beat, but it bears repeating—China is a country containing multitudes within multitudes. Those multitudes ebb and flow in zigzag fashion, but that hasn’t stopped the Western hemisphere from hurtling toward linear categorizations and literal-mindedness. We see Yao pushing his body to limits for a cause that seems far flung from everyfan realities. (Zig) But at varying points throughout his career, we’ve also seen him be silly, wise, cocky, fatalistic, self-aware, angry, unflappable, rattled-to-the-core. (Zag) If Kobe is the man of a million Machiavellian faces to his detractors, then Yao is the fragmented, pixilated visage of a billion reluctant fans and their foibles, few of whom are willing or able to defend him as being unassailably great.



So does that make Yao a blank canvas that leaves the etching of destiny to others? If you think that, then I have an autographed poster of Antoine Walker I’d like to sell you. When Yao first came into the league, he was eminently quotable, but in a way that seemed tailormade for caricatures stemming from Asian Mystique. He would alternate between zany philosophical musings and carefully constructed nationalist mantras. After the Beijing Olympics ended, he even went so far as to say his “life was over.” Not so the Yao of today. Though he remains quip-y (his crack about America’s National Anthem being his favorite song because he hears it 365 days a year seems a pretty cleverly disguised rebuke of compulsory patriotism), Yao no longer speaks like Yoda-meets-Sun-Tzu, and refers instead to personal triumphs and priorities with something resembling ebullience.

While chronic injuries have robbed T-mac of his once-irrepressible vitality, they seem to have reinvigorated Yao, who now plays, acts, and talks like someone who can’t be bothered with the weight of tradition or the double-edged sword of transparency, whereas both remain major hang-ups for China. Perhaps he’s finally realizing that, unlike the Lebrons and Kobes of the world, nothing is preordained, and that he can rewrite the script as many times as he sees fit. In a way, the mundane inevitability of Yao’s injuries have helped put his mortality into clearer focus—it helps liberate him from our static, decontextualized ideas of spectatorship, not to mention the stale notion that his multi-facetedness is somehow artificially conceived.

That same paradigm exists with China—the more we treat its symbols as fuzzy math, the more easily flummoxed we become. As liberated fans, we should know better. After all, we can take a Right Way canard like “let the game come to him” and turn it into a triumph of individual style. In Yao’s case, though, letting the game come to him is about letting everything else go. Only then does he know what’s still worth holding on to.

It Was So Familiar Then

First of all, if you haven't been reading the comments section of my "post" on the Darfur/China/Olympics situation, you simply must. T., our man in China and one of the site's longest-tenured community readers, is absolutely killing it with perspective from inside that country, right now.

One thing he raised that stuck with me: No country likes being criticized by foreigners, especially not a budding superpower that's defensive about its place on the world stage. My whole argument hinged on both the complexity (read: elusiveness) of China's hand in the genocide, as well as how little it had to do with the NBA players expected to speak out against it. I guess in a perfect world they would've anyway, but we would've been holding them to a ridiculously high standard. One that, were there not a moral absolute like mass slaughters somewhere in the equation, might be viewed as meddling.

Just writing that makes me feel like a heartless relativist, but there's also a streak of pragmatism to it. Yes, in the eyes of idealism, pragmatism always seems like a form of resignation or compromise. Especially when Jerry Colangelo could be the mastermind behind it. And yet there's also a back-handed etiquette at play there, one that defers to others in a better position, or with a greater responsibility, to speak.

All of which brings me to T.'s point that, if anyone's in an ideal position to speak out, it's Yao. It's not ideal in that China still controls much of him, and his purse strings. He would do so at great risk. But "ideal" doesn't mean convenient, it means "perfect." And isn't the point of speaking out to do so with some leverage, to create a critical mass of tension and unavoidability?



I know that America is a beacon of freedom for all the rest of the world, and it's on our athletes to spread that particular gospel. That's another form of idealism, one that makes for good narrative but almost always collides awkwardly with the real world. If we were going to be honest with ourselves about who should be talking about Darfur, we have to not only admit that Yao's closer to the issue. He may not be among the persecuted, but at least his relationship with China is based on more than a web of international commerce. We also need to recognize that, while condemning genocide is easy and universal, Team USA has zero idea how to go about discussing the issue in terms that might make sense to the Chinese people—which, as guests of China, they would for all intents and purposes be doing.

Of course, all of us feel strange insistng Yao do such and such, precisely because it would be painful for him, while our Olympians would just find themselves in awkard situation after awkward situation. And that's exactly how meaningful change should feel, since it involves more than just semi-informed twenty-somethings saying that raping and burning is wrong. Yes, LeBron said he would, Kobe did a PSA, and Tracy McGrady and Ira Newble have made Darfur into the rare international issue that draws the interest of the NBA community. They are the most famous athletes in the Games, and by far the wealthiest. That and their basketball crusade has been from the beginning bound up in national pride, which brings with it all sorts of well-meaning, deeply-felt, and possibly empty platitudes—that bad kind of idealism again.

Or, on some level, did we all not look at these Redeem Teamers as the sons of Jesse Owens, John Carlos, and Tommie Smith? There's that superficial, perhaps sentimental, identification, as well as the persistent hope that the NBA—because its denizens are for the most part black, visible on the field, and play a game that has long been interpreted in terms of race—would develop a political consciousness. And hey, it just so happens that the people suffering in Darfur are dark-skinned—though calling for some kind of solution there seems like basic human decency, and Sudan about as far from anywhere in the USA as you could imagine.

And, as much as I hate to say it, there's the fantasy that that the bad-ass black dude will take a stand, with a presence that a big 'ol Asian could only dream of mustering. They are strong, and outlaws, and rebels, and Other, and always in the struggle, and should do the work that real power brokers are afraid to. Oh, and do so with style. Maybe that's racist, maybe it's laudatory, maybe some of both. Let's leave it at this: I'm not comfortable making Team USA the locus of Olympic activism if doing so is just an extension of domestic baggage.

We're all stuck here for a while

First, there was this:

"Hopefully, he's not fighting anymore and going after a guy in the stands."

Then, there was this:

"I understand what Yao said, but I'm still ghetto. That's not going to change. I'm never going to change my culture. Yao has played with a lot of black players, but I don't think he's ever played with a black player that really represents his culture as much as I represent my culture.

I was a little worried about something like this:




Fortunately, last night, there was this:

I spoke to Yao and I told him I can't wait to play with him....I was a little bit disturbed, mainly because [of] the brawl comments. That's four years removed from now, maybe four or five years removed … I wanted [Yao] to know I was a little bit frustrated, but I understand where he's coming from. But I cannot wait to be a part of that team.

As FreeDarko's resident Asian, I breathed a deep sigh of relief when I read that. There have been some tense moments between Asian-Americans and African-Americans throughout our history, but this is an encouraging sign that Yao and Ron Ron can come to some sort of mutual understanding. To help with the healing, I offer this brief photo essay.

No more of this:



More of this:












Incidentally, there's a pretty simple solution to Paul Pierce's "I'm the best in the league" or Jordan's "handicap me a decade and I'd dominate Kobe" noise we've been hearing this summer:

Henry Chinaski is not Spider-Man

The NBA All-Star Weekend is, as much as anything else, a sort of Topsy-Turvy celebration, where traditional roles are set aside and the hierarchy of the league is put in reverse for one glorious weekend. In the three-point contest, specialists dominate MVPs in a supposedly objective contest. (I don't really acknowledge the presence of the other two All-Star Saturday events, but if you wanted to stick with the theory, the skills contest is a measure of the individual abilities of those whose best attribute is making their teammates better, and the Shooting Stars Competition is basketball as a boring and miserable exercise.) The dunk contest has come to celebrate something wholly different from what it claims to be, celebrating style and creativity rather than showcasing the pure awe that MJ, Dominique, and Vince were able to instill during their reigns over the contest. Consider the post-Carter dunk contest champions: Jason Richardson now leads the league in threes made. Fred Jones, Desmond Mason and Gerald Green are in various stages of irrelevance. 0% of Nate Robinson's shots in games are dunks. (I'll get to Josh Smith later.)

This year, of course, was the exception. Dwight Howard is the most functional dunker of my lifetime, and while I was 7 years old when proto-Shaq left the Magic, I can't really imagine making more impact by dunking the ball than Howard is now-he's a legitimate top-10 player in the league and a full third of his shots are dunks, and even when he doesn't dunk he changes the defense, as they must keep someone between him and the basket at all possible times in fear of the alley-oop. When he plays, the court pulsates with the power of dunk. And yet his dunk contest was marked by triumphs of style rather than substance, with his signature dunk being a show of smoke and mirrors while THE BIRTHDAY CAKE was, like Howard's tragically futile sticker dunk, a demonstration of substance-as-style, and the contest ended with Green doing a ridiculously difficult dunk that didn't photograph well (seriously, try jumping off a hardwood floor in socks), while Howard did a two-handed windmill using a toy hoop.

When a guy who just got waived rides for degree of difficulty while an MVP candidate goes for style points, it just tells you that All-Star weekend is a distorted time. (Disclaimer: In no way did that paragraph mean to deprecate Howard's deservingness, mainly due to the Inverted Windmill and the Ambitastic Tappy-Oop, it's just saying that Howard based his claim on style while Green dealt more in degree of difficulty, which is odd considering their relative ability.)

Of course, the game itself is the greatest example of All-Star Weekend's spirit of casting aside the shackles of team roles, as players, especially for the first three quarters, govern their games by what they feel they should be instead of what they are told to be. Watching the All-Star game often reminds me of the story in The Blind Side where Michael Oher, the 6-7, 280-pound future offensive tackle, showed up to play basketball for his tiny high school not with the game of a banger who lived in the paint, but as a shooting guard who preferred to gracefully handle the ball and rip threes off the dribble, because he'd learned the game by practicing alone on the street and had never even seen himself in the mirror.

In other words, he played like a guard because nobody had ever told him that he was a big man. This is reflected by The All-Star Game's freeing nature; we get to see Dwight Howard only taking dunks, Rasheed Wallace popping left-handed threes, Yao launching threes himself, Jason Kidd getting 10 assists but only shooting twice, AI dishing out 6 assists and only shooting 7 times, 'Melo shamelessly gunning, VC treating basketball as aesthetic exhibition as opposed to athletic competition, and the like.

But look at the MVP of the contest. He went for 27/8/9 on 12-22 from the floor and 2-7 from deep. His season averages are 31/8/7 on 22 shots and 5 threes. In other words, for LeBron, the All-Star Game, when players can do as they feel, was exactly like any other game. Even his signature play, the game-sealing dunk, was a slashing dunk through traffic instead of a VC/T-Mac show, the kind of highlight he generally provides within the context of a game.

It's not even that LeBron is the least inhibited superstar we've seen since, like, ever: it's that it makes sense. At the highest level of basketball LeBron played before the big show, he took the tip, brought the ball up, hit the boards, slung dimes, just generally did the whole thing up, and now he's more or less doing what he feels in the pros. Some will tell you that some Coach K in LeBron would have done him right; footwork down low, form in the mid-range game, etc. This is untrue. Sure, he might have some fundamentals, but would they have come at the cost of the freedom that makes him as he is? That's a rhetorical question.

Several folk have noted that the best players in the league are from the high school cloth; according to Race For the MVP, the best player in the L has been McGrady, Howard, LBJ, Kobe, or KG for all but one week, and Amare remains the unsung MVP candidate. What stands out about these players is not just how good they are but how unique they are, with the possible exception of Kobe, who didn't go to college but did intern at the Zen Academy.

LeBron is a dominant big man who plays de facto point guard on the perimeter. Howard eschews traditional big-man offense and instead just finds creative ways to use the power of dunk. KG has struck the elusive balance between "little-big" and "big-big" skills. Amare makes his office not on the blocks but by catching passes at he top of the circle and thundering downward. T-Mac works the point forward. (Even before the class of '95, the guys blazing the trails were from the closest thing to high school ball, the land of the small college, which gave us Scottie Pippen and Dennis Rodman in their unconventional glory.)

Even the non-all star HS guys work in powerful and mysterious ways; Josh Smith might be one of the best defensive players in the league as a shot-blocking shooting guard. The Warriors, the league's most unconventionally fantastic team, employ only two rotation players who have ever set foot in college, and one of them is demi-god Baron Davis, who played to his own beat even at the Church of Wooden. (Unrelated note on the Warriors, prompted by the Mavericks losing Nowitzki and still yet to beat a winning team after their panic trade: not only are the Warriors capable of beating anyone, at any time, essentially based on the health of their spirit animals, they are perfectly capable of claiming a team's soul as part of the transaction.)

Last time I talked about college basketball, I advocated for the value of a good role player coming out of college, as many of the guys laden with "upside" and expectations end up falling short, while guys who know how to do their jobs are overlooked and cause chagrin among all when they continue to do their jobs well in the NBA. Upon further review, I've pretty much decided that college basketball's system of assigning roles is purely and simply evil no matter what. Players like J. Smith would be shackled to the confinements of being a traditional shooting guard, robbing us of his high-flying exploits at power forward. Monta Ellis would be told to run the point. Amare and Dwight would have been told to quit their flights of fancy and stick their butts on the blocks. THIS WAS DAVID LEE. Josh Smith is not effective despite his rawness: He is effective because he is allowed to be raw.

Even those given absolute freedom in college end up shackled by their role as savior: Instead of being allowed the key to unlocking his talents at his own place and find his game, Durant was thrown into the role of savior and is now being forced to suffer by a team whose only move to develop him in any sort of positive way was to trade for Donyell Marshall, who shall serve as a vivid and horrifying reminder to Durant of what he could someday become. Hell, look at AI; every time he's had talent around him, in the Olympics or the All-Star game, and to a lesser degree with Denver, he practically aches to show the world he is not a ball-hog at his core, but has been shoehorned into being one by the likes of Kevin Ollie. (If you want my take on B-Easy; I fear for him as well. A fast power forward who can take big guys off the dribble from the free throw line and become a bigger David West, a faster Carlos Boozer, or Super-Bonzi? Good Policy. A guy who's slow for an elite NBA perimeter player and favors fadeaways from 21 feet and turns the ball over twice as much as he gets assists given 20 shots a game and told to make it work? Bad Policy.)

For all the noise about HS guys being thrust into the limelight too quickly, coming into the NBA incomplete and mercurial will always be better than having to shoulder the burden of perceived completion; by being allowed to find the music of their own games, the HS guys eventually found an off-beat form of truth as yet unrivaled by any other category of player. Even LeBron, who came in wearing savior white, was allowed to find his way in Cleveland, who experimented with him at the point but eventually stuck him on the wing, took Ricky Davis and D-Miles out back and shot them, and allowed him to run things as he always had and shall continue to do.

The age limit is an affront to what makes basketball great; basketball-as-jazz is something we refer to as little as possible here, but the age limit puts Coltrane in a symphony. But it's not going away, and it might even get raised soon, so we should make the most of our chance to appreciate the rare and off-center diamond that is the High School player while we still can, who base their games on what they are rather than what they were told to be, and find greatness where they could not be shown to look. And if the age limit applied to sports bloggers, you'd be reading this in The Daily Trojan. The age limit sucks.

Coarse Shine in Forests

I keep trying to form a cohesive thesis about the Rockets streak, one that won't give away how little I watched them pre-Yao injury, or bring out the disdain I once had for half that roster. What's really tugging at me is the correlation between a streak and self-definition. Or, more accurately, how a run can define a team but a streak usually involves getting caught up in the moment, deferring to circumstance, and feeling like you've been touched by something large and possibly sinister.

The other night, Barkley said thus: "Just like with the Blazers, when the Rockets stop hitting their jump shots, then they'll really have to learn who they are." To extrapolate, a monolithic streak can't furnish an identity, since there's too much luck, and fluke, and danger involved. What's more, while the streak is most certainly a statement of might, it's also wistful and already soaked in its own nostalgia.

That is, assuming Barkley is right. I happened to think his conclusions were so off, they rotted. We have no problem with saying that the Lakers' going on a tear indicates a realization of potential, a celebration of what that team should be. Everything falling into place and the team running wild with relief. I'd have to put the be-Yao-ed part of this streak in that category, since it showed that Yao/T-Mac could be rescued from their rut by the right coach. Adelman was brought on to make this nucleus less stagnant, to lift a curse than JVG's exile only partly symbolized.



But here's why I'm now kept up late at night thinking about the post-Yao phase: This team hit a major snag and kept going. Not through residual pixie dust, or the regenerative power of fumes. This is almost a second, separate streak, one that involves the level of self-discovery we associate with random teams (Warriors, anyone?) finding a groove and inflicting it upon others. Except in this case, the wins pile up in succession, in a way that should discount the very seriousness of what's at hand.

Who knows when this ends. I'd like to think tomorrow in Atlanta, but that's unlikely. Over the weekend in Los Angeles, probably, especially with Kobe-as-Grinch the role of a lifetime. But I don't think we'll ever be able to discount that, far from lacking in substance, this streak has contained two season-changing junctures that are usually at odds with the tawdriness of endless, endless victory. These are matters of identity, or learning who you are with the crucible blasting all around.

For a team to pull off two, possibly divergent, versions of this, to accept its destiny and then manufacture a new one on the fly without the ticks or pauses that should give it credibility . . . you'll excuse me if this strikes me as almost overpowering in its intensity. There's nothing trivial about this twice-over transformation, and yet the fairy tale forcefulness seems to demand some. Only time will tell, I guess, if this Rockets team is really that endlessly, disgustingly resilient and resourceful.

The Darning Stick

Well, I guess you can't quite ever have perfection, can you. The NBA season was on the brink of becoming the wildest in history, with the league suddenly transformed into the NCAA football system. Every single Western Conference game mattered and every game that the Pistons and Celtics played seemed of grand import for determining who would garner that 1-seed in the East and not have to face LeBron in the playoffs. The race out West has been so tight that post-Pau Gasol, teams have been involved in a chess match on the largest scale, flipping and trading pieces left and right to stay afloat. Firegeorgekarl.com sprang up gloriously from the earth's core, which proves just how competitive things have gotten. Denver fans had realized that the current climate out West had given their team as it is currently operating a surprisingly bleak chance for the playoffs.



But when the news of Yao's injury hit yesterday, amidst the ridiculousness of Ric Bucher and the Rockets GM being legitimately asked if this was somehow a ploy to ready Yao for the Beijing Olympics, I couldn't help but feel that this season no longer counts. Ever since the Rockets got McGrady, they have been my pre-season pick to come out of the West, and this year, with Adelman finally equipped with a team that could play defense, Houston actually proving that they could win withOUT T-Mac scoring 30 a night, the recent 12(13)-game winning streak, and most importantly Yao's newfound swag, I thought it could finally happen.

There are seasons in the NBA when a championship means a lot, and seasons when it means relatively less. Larry Brown's Pistons beating the Lakers in 2004 was the greatest upset in sports over the past five years, better than George Mason, Eli Manning, or Warriors vs Mavs. THAT was a championship. There are other seasons, however, where the glory has been diminished by mitigating factors. Sometimes one conference is so strong that all the scrapping their finals representative did to get to reach the championship round has exhausted them. Other times, key players are absent from the entire scene. Charles Barkley jokingly talks about how Michael Jordan "loaned" Olajuwon and the Rockets their two titles during the mid-90s when Jordan opted to try baseball for a couple years. Wade's abdominal injury a couple years back, Shaq's toe and Kobe's knee back in 2003, even these things matter.


And now it is Yao whose absence shakes skyscrapers. Jason Kidd, the 2008-Shaquille O'Neal, Pau Gasol, sure these are nice pieces for a playoff run. But I wanted to see if we have really entred the age of post-Center supremacy. I wanted to see if the Suns, Lakers, Mavs, or Spurs could really defeat Yao--in his prime--in a seven game series. The whole situation just leaves me feeling a bit hollow.

...In other news, this new Nike Kobe campaign, which can be seen here, gives us endless joy. This commercial is like the anti-KG-Adidas-joint. This commercial is totally They Might Be Giants.