love and basketball
I've also been meaning for a while to start posting little things about basketball; I really enjoy following the nba, and the nuggets in particular, and I feel like all those hours I waste away watching games or even just highlights and box scores should feed into something a little more meaningful than my fantasy basketball league... the problem is I feel like I need to qualify/preface extensively any sort of 'content' about basketball. So I'll do my best to explain my hesitancies, and hopefully somewhere down the line I'll get to flippant little raves about J.R. Smith.
So, some personal background: I'd always followed the Nuggets casually growing up. Going to a couple games in the early 90s to see Dikembe, Bryant Stith, and Robert Pack were some of my first sports memories, and I still remember the excitement about their underdog playoff run in... 1994? It seems to me that the most enduring sports team bonds are formed in childhood (like before age 10), even if they go latent for a while, which is what mine did. What happened was the nuggets got bad, like running-joke bad (they even made a "simpsons" episode), and although I still kept some track of them, there wasn't a lot to watch--coaching changes, whining overpaid selfish players (I'm looking at you, Nick Van Exel), bad trades, and, oh yeah, the Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf standing for the national anthem controversy, an awkward anti-Islam moment if I've ever seen one. And then college happened. A friend of mine, a huge Rockets fan, invited me into a fantasy basketball league, to watch games, etc. The nuggets drafted a soon-to-be superstar, the season got really exciting, the two of us road-tripped to Phoenix to watch some March Madness. It was great. I rediscovered the nuances of the game. I did everything short of picking up a ball myself (which is ironic if you've been around me one of the million times when an adult has said, "You're really tall! Do you play basketball?"). Since then is history, in a manner of speaking. I love watching the game, I follow players, I defend my team to the death, except when they make me yell-at-the-tv angry.
And that would be the whole story, only there's NO WAY you can talk about basketball in America without talking about race. And that conversation doesn't happen nearly often enough. I trust some cultural critics, like Spike Lee or Scoop Jackson, to respect the tricky and intertwined relationship between the two, but generally it seems to me that race is given awkward gloss-over treatment most of the time when it's not outright distorted.
Basketball is an important cultural site, at which black popular culture gets spun and packaged and marketed to America, so much so that most reporting on the nba tacitly carries racial assumptions and baggage with it. For example, media coverage of the past few years' Portland "Jail Blazers" teams was all about (but never explicitly mentioned) that they were really sending a message about the irresponsibility of young, wealthy black men. Allen Iverson is iconic not only for his game, but for sure because he has become conflated, in my opinion unfairly, with the "ghettoization" of basketball culture. Commentators get to make all sorts of racial commentary-loaded remarks about selfishness and "fundamentals" without acknowledging the discourse in which they're working.
One of the worst offenders, in my opinion, is in discussions of coaches, mostly because there doesn't seem to be the same level of awareness of the way bias filters the discussion. Most of the coaches regularly ripped apart in the media are black; it seems to me that most nba coaches are lousy regardless of race, but for some reason scathing criticism of white coaches doesn't make it on a national level the way it does for their counterparts. There's something about the combination of reputation and perceived intelligence of white coaches that seems to exempt them from blame (looking at you, George Karl, and Scott Skiles probably too), when the margin for error for black coaches seems to be a lot more slight (Eddie Jordan and Mike Dunleavy are both winless on the road this year; one is black, the other is white; one is on the "hot seat" while the other is about to sign a four-year contract extension; *cough*). Although the double standard is not as flagrant as in, say, college football (I hope they apologized to you, Tyrone Willingham), because at least there are *some* black coaches, the league is far from colorblind.
So, problematizing the media? Painted in broad strokes, but off my chest. Where this connects to my wanting to write puffy blog entries about my team or whatever is in how the sport gets unpacked in print. Can someone really describe their appreciation for basketball without somehow taking a position on the aspects of black culture that are being sold? I doubt it. Broadly, one of the reasons I love the nba is because I think that there's a clear and tangible connection between a player's personality and how they interact with the game--watching the nuggets has been an absolute joy for the past couple years because they play at speed, trying to gloss over substantial deficiencies (a game plan designed around not being able to shoot long-range), their offense runs through several different players over the course of a game, and because they're good at the fast break, which basically punishes a team for failing to keep up with your hustle. One of the things I like about Kenyon Martin (critics, say what you will) is his bottomless supply of swagger, and the fact that he always follows shots in on the offensive end for the put-back. These raw displays of... character, for no better word, are what make every team distinctive and every star a target of either admiration or hate. But "character" shouldn't be discussed without some awareness of the racial discourse which underlies whatever traits are up for discussion. Carlos Boozer lying to a blind guy about resigning with the Cavs may be a pretty universally crappy thing, but most displays of "personality" interact on a variety of levels with social constructions and expectations. So, in short, I love basketball, but it's damn hard to talk about fairly.
So, some personal background: I'd always followed the Nuggets casually growing up. Going to a couple games in the early 90s to see Dikembe, Bryant Stith, and Robert Pack were some of my first sports memories, and I still remember the excitement about their underdog playoff run in... 1994? It seems to me that the most enduring sports team bonds are formed in childhood (like before age 10), even if they go latent for a while, which is what mine did. What happened was the nuggets got bad, like running-joke bad (they even made a "simpsons" episode), and although I still kept some track of them, there wasn't a lot to watch--coaching changes, whining overpaid selfish players (I'm looking at you, Nick Van Exel), bad trades, and, oh yeah, the Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf standing for the national anthem controversy, an awkward anti-Islam moment if I've ever seen one. And then college happened. A friend of mine, a huge Rockets fan, invited me into a fantasy basketball league, to watch games, etc. The nuggets drafted a soon-to-be superstar, the season got really exciting, the two of us road-tripped to Phoenix to watch some March Madness. It was great. I rediscovered the nuances of the game. I did everything short of picking up a ball myself (which is ironic if you've been around me one of the million times when an adult has said, "You're really tall! Do you play basketball?"). Since then is history, in a manner of speaking. I love watching the game, I follow players, I defend my team to the death, except when they make me yell-at-the-tv angry.
And that would be the whole story, only there's NO WAY you can talk about basketball in America without talking about race. And that conversation doesn't happen nearly often enough. I trust some cultural critics, like Spike Lee or Scoop Jackson, to respect the tricky and intertwined relationship between the two, but generally it seems to me that race is given awkward gloss-over treatment most of the time when it's not outright distorted.
Basketball is an important cultural site, at which black popular culture gets spun and packaged and marketed to America, so much so that most reporting on the nba tacitly carries racial assumptions and baggage with it. For example, media coverage of the past few years' Portland "Jail Blazers" teams was all about (but never explicitly mentioned) that they were really sending a message about the irresponsibility of young, wealthy black men. Allen Iverson is iconic not only for his game, but for sure because he has become conflated, in my opinion unfairly, with the "ghettoization" of basketball culture. Commentators get to make all sorts of racial commentary-loaded remarks about selfishness and "fundamentals" without acknowledging the discourse in which they're working.
One of the worst offenders, in my opinion, is in discussions of coaches, mostly because there doesn't seem to be the same level of awareness of the way bias filters the discussion. Most of the coaches regularly ripped apart in the media are black; it seems to me that most nba coaches are lousy regardless of race, but for some reason scathing criticism of white coaches doesn't make it on a national level the way it does for their counterparts. There's something about the combination of reputation and perceived intelligence of white coaches that seems to exempt them from blame (looking at you, George Karl, and Scott Skiles probably too), when the margin for error for black coaches seems to be a lot more slight (Eddie Jordan and Mike Dunleavy are both winless on the road this year; one is black, the other is white; one is on the "hot seat" while the other is about to sign a four-year contract extension; *cough*). Although the double standard is not as flagrant as in, say, college football (I hope they apologized to you, Tyrone Willingham), because at least there are *some* black coaches, the league is far from colorblind.
So, problematizing the media? Painted in broad strokes, but off my chest. Where this connects to my wanting to write puffy blog entries about my team or whatever is in how the sport gets unpacked in print. Can someone really describe their appreciation for basketball without somehow taking a position on the aspects of black culture that are being sold? I doubt it. Broadly, one of the reasons I love the nba is because I think that there's a clear and tangible connection between a player's personality and how they interact with the game--watching the nuggets has been an absolute joy for the past couple years because they play at speed, trying to gloss over substantial deficiencies (a game plan designed around not being able to shoot long-range), their offense runs through several different players over the course of a game, and because they're good at the fast break, which basically punishes a team for failing to keep up with your hustle. One of the things I like about Kenyon Martin (critics, say what you will) is his bottomless supply of swagger, and the fact that he always follows shots in on the offensive end for the put-back. These raw displays of... character, for no better word, are what make every team distinctive and every star a target of either admiration or hate. But "character" shouldn't be discussed without some awareness of the racial discourse which underlies whatever traits are up for discussion. Carlos Boozer lying to a blind guy about resigning with the Cavs may be a pretty universally crappy thing, but most displays of "personality" interact on a variety of levels with social constructions and expectations. So, in short, I love basketball, but it's damn hard to talk about fairly.
posted by sam at
4:19 PM
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