It All Falls Somewhere

Spectacle has no angle, no perspective. It is horror without intent, intent without horror; it fuses the two poles of aesthetics and outcome as if there had never been an need to reconcile them. There is now a complete circle where before we had long chains of dialectics, writhing between extremes more friendly than they knew. Gone is the case-by-case nature, which required the utmost level of devotion -- either an intuitive crackle, or monastic grind. War's finery and brutality were historically used in the West to mask and enrich one another. Then in the modern age, war-as-spectacle turned power into art, and art into an expression of power. It's fascism, but it's also every single terrorist organization that garnered street cred with kids in the latest digs.

And yes, spectacle is the place where war bleeds into sport without the least bit of room for resistance.

Did you hear the one about last night's TNT line-up. Coming into this season -- as far back as Hoop Summit 2009, actually -- I had expected Wall to not only wow us all with highlights, but rip through the fabric of the game. Some players expand possibilities; others leave categories in liquid ruin. Wall struck me as the kind who lashes out at what we know as if each play were his opening salvo. LeBron James is his own canon; the young Kevin Garnett had a gate-crashing spirit fit for the maddest explorer or most abstract scientist. Wall, though, would make his mark through spectacle, aggressive gestures that left you stunned, and altered the game, while leaving little trace of where they came from or how they might happen again. I still have that hope for Wall, but the newfound importance of the NBA point guard is, in some ways, a burden. The quarterback analogy, along with the learning curve that position demands, is relevant like never before. Structure isn't orthodoxy -- if anything, it's a chance for grander subversion. And yet it's a different kind of engagement.

Wall can still disrupt our basketball brains, and yet to really come into his own, he must expand this sensibility to an entire unit. Impossible? Who knows. Paul is a mastermind, Rondo an eccentric, Nash a trickster. Jazz fans, stick your Deron Williams line here. None of them had Wall's smoldering message, and yet each has consistently found a way to lead their troops not only toward the basket, but to send them scurrying with style -- an extension of themselves. There simply is no other position that offers this possibility, to transmute the quirks of one's game into something resembling a community. There is something cult-ish about it. These things don't end well in the real world. Especially when, in the thick of it, you find a player like Wall -- who, by definition, is at his best when he overrides what we thought we knew. I have no idea what a team premised on this kind of gesture means, and if "prophetic" is even the right word. Do prophets cause problems, or do they teach us anew? Saying "both" seems both unreasonable, presumptuous, and something only yours truly on the sidelines of both basketball and belief would ever tell you. I do know, though, that JaVale McGee figures prominently is that as-of-yet unknown future.



Blake Griffin doesn't have these problems. In part, it's because a vaguely-defined "big man", a giant entrusted merely with making life difficult, even harrowing, for other tall people or smaller ones who would come near the basket. The center has dissolved, and we are left with the "big man". Garnett may have started it, but don't disregard Tim Duncan's unwillingness to play, or be defined as, a five. Or everyone's refusal to be listed as 7'. What's left for Griffin, then, is a space blank, raw, and undefined. He has answered with the ultimate in basketball-as-spectacle. We can attempt to talk about him rationally -- how his combination of power, skill, strength, precision, speed, athleticism, and zeal is fairly unprecedented (LeBron doesn't use his size like this, nor is he as big). I could post some videos to remind you of his greatest hits. Yet Griffin's every move contains within it a shard of his genius. That's the definition of style, and yet in this case, the way that dominance is etched. When we lose this distinction, totalizing occur and spectacle overtakes us. Nothing is frivolous, or entertaining without suggesting a trail of wreckage and damnation left huddled in the corner. The chills Griffin gives us may be degree of difficulty, or because he makes it look so easy. Technology and culture hate each other most when they stare out from the same eyes.

From a fan's perspective, Blake Griffin is one of the most amazing athletes I have ever watched, as well as one of the most frightening. It is these same qualities that also likely make him one of the best. I said last night that Griffin is this NBA season's sole must-watch. Why? Pumped-up excerpts don't do him justice, and neither does the removed act of "having the game on". Griffin plays a different sport than everyone else. Wall would swoop in and scramble expectations. Griffin simply ignores that there was anything there before or since, or that showmanship and brute effectiveness need, for practical purposes, go their separate ways in a blink. His method isn't expert chaos, but a space-aged roar that makes you shout out in joy and pain at once -- at both the "how" and the "what".

This is the heart of spectacle, and when you're sucked in, you can't tell which way is up and which is down. It is the end and the beginning, for the game and for the way we parse it. Sometimes, I'm not even sure whether I'm supposed to love or hate him. Once upon a time, man discovered fire. According to the Greeks, Prometheus paid a price, but for an adjective like that, I would give my liver to a buzzard who knew more than I did.

Stop and Hold the Catapault

Jason Johnson is, by his own admission, not particularly stylish or athletic. He does however hold the distinction of being the world's tallest sports/style blogger. He can most often be found at clydefrazierapproves.com.

It was the fall 1998. The Jordan era had come to an end, again and even the lockout couldn’t hide the fact that the league was suffering through an identity crisis. Eastern and Central European players had begun to make their mark, but they were still tainted by an air of otherness. There was something unsavory about them. There were reports of players smoking cigarettes at half-time. Accounts of questionable hygiene. They didn’t attack the basket, bang in the post or play defense. In short, they were soft. That’s what I saw from the likes of Vlade Divac, Toni Kukoc. That’s what the announcers told me. For a tragically brief period Drazen Petrovic was an outlier, the exception that proved the rule, but like Big Pun, he just didn’t leave behind a large enough body of work to be adequately judged ..

At the time, I was living in a shipping container in the Balkans.The kind that got lost in the stacks, or served as a trans-Atlantic holding cell for smuggled human cargo, on Season Two of The Wire. I, along with another US soldier shared 20 x 8 box of corrugated steel for the better part of six months. We, a U.S. contingent of 9 were assigned to the makeshift Turkish Army Base on the grounds of an abandoned steel mill in Zenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina. For six days and twenty hours of each week, our world consisted of nine shipping containers; five bedrooms, kitchen, bath, office and weight room. The grounds of the base were sprawling, but most of the facility belonged to the Turks. They controlled the six-story office building along with all of the permanent outbuildings and warehouses.

About halfway between the U.S. Hooverville and the Turk Majal, at the bottom of the hill lay a basketball court. Originally put there so that the steelworkers could let off a little steam it had fallen into what could generously be called a state of disrepair. The concrete had cracked, and had begun to crumble in places and the metal backboard was speckled with rust. By the time we arrived, it had become home to a pack of mangy, stray dogs. We had to be armed at all times when leaving base, which meant no going into town to play ball. For us, the condition of the court was something of a minor tragedy.

With no court, and no NBA, we got our hoops fix via Playstation. My chief NBA Live partner was a local kid we hired as an interpreter. I don’t think I ever learned his real name, but everyone called him OJ. OJ seemed like your typical 25 year old slacker, with one difference: he was eighteen. “War ages you quickly,” he explained once. He was a healthy, good-looking ethnic Bosniak, and non-observant Muslim. He hadn’t grown up in the area, but like so many other Bosniaks, moved there after his hometown became less hospitable.

Reliably absent when actual translation services were needed, OJ would breeze through to play video games, drink slivovitz and talk hoops when we had down-time. I, a Knicks fan, was telling anyone who would listen at the time, that Allen Houston was the best shooting guard in the league (I know it seems ridiculous now, but Mike was gone, and Kobe hadn’t become Kobe and I could convince myself that AI was a point-guard). OJ insisted that some guy with a bunch of Ks, Vs and Zs in his name was better, but would never get the chance to show it, because NBA coaches were prejudiced. He claimed that American players lacked fundamental skills and would soon be exposed. It was easy to dismiss his claims as jingoistic nonsense, since American players were clearly superior as evidenced by the middling accomplishments of European players in the league. I don’t remember who he played with, but I do recall him running a penetrate-and-kick offense.



One fateful day, he challenged three of us to a half court game. Two of his friends had been hired as translators and now had NATO ID cards, which, with our permission, would get them on the base. Initially we protested that the court wasn’t safe but OJ insisted that only children need fear the dogs. I don’t know if I completely bought into that, but we weren’t exactly in a position where we could afford to look scared, so it was game on. My teammates were a 23-year-old kid from Minnesota, and a 30 year old from Iowa who probably hadn’t touched a basketball since high school. I figured that even if they couldn’t play, I could blow by or elevate over my man consistently enough to carry us.

The day came, and we found ourselves matched up against three college aged kids, who at 6’2” to 6’7” could all handle the rock and shoot the three. In the post, they possessed that wiry strength that, despite what we say, we don’t really believe exists. Every rebound was a struggle. They fought for the ball like it was something precious. None of them seemed to be able to dunk, yet all of them could jump high enough to block my attempts ... on the rare occasions that they actually let me get into the lane. Their physical interior defense made low-post play seem like an inefficient use of energy and forced us to rely on out nonexistent outside shooting. For three games we were thoroughly outclassed, as the beatings got progressively worse. I had lost my share of basketball games in the past, but never had I left a court so defeated. Other losses had been disheartening and even humiliating, but none had ever shaken my beliefs.

It doesn’t exactly take a genius to realize that war hardens people, so it is absurd to assume that these guys would be soft. Yet that’s just what we did. The stereotype of the soft, effete Euro isn’t as prevalent in today’s NBA as it was in 1998, but it still persists to a degree. It can be seen in the media’s coverage of Nenad Krstic’s chair flinging at this past summer’s friendly against Greece. We were treated to footage of an unhinged seven-footer throwing a chair in a brawl. Do you have any idea how terrifying that has to be in real life? I’d venture it’s a hell of a lot scarier than AI (allegedly) throwing a chair, and yet it carried very little of the sport’s media’s righteous indignation. In fact, it almost seemed to be played for laughs, and forgotten as soon as the World Championships began in earnest. Darko had a largely forgotten tirade where he threatened to rape a referee’s children. Neither of these players has been slapped with the “thug” tag yet.

It would be easy and lazy to pull the race card here, but I don’t think Kevin Love could have gotten away with that behavior either. Race is definitely a consideration, but it’s not the crucial component used in stereotyping foreign-born players. We, as American basketball fans are quick to stereotype our homegrown players as products of their environment. For so many European players, that environment is just…foreign. It’s our ignorance of their circumstance that leads to a fundamental misunderstanding of their personalities and temperments. You just can’t take those Euros too seriously when they try to act tough. It’s just too cute. Daily Thunder ran a piece called “Nenad Kristic Fights Like a Little Brother". It’s unfathomable how much more easily we dismiss the aggression of young men raised in literal war zones than those born in figurative war zones.