European Vacation

It was around this time last year I sat in a bar discussing what I thought would be the next revolution in professional basketball.  After watching Brandon Jennings light-up Milwaukee it seemed natural for top-tier high school athletes to follow his path to the NBA, forgoing the traditional, maybe archaic, leap to college for the money and professional experience Europe could provide.  

While Jennings’ Italian foray was purely self-serving, a way to usurp the NBA’s requirement for rookies to be a year removed from high school and still get paid, that doesn’t make it any less revolutionary.  Money is always the root of revolution.  NCAA basketball is one of only two revenue generating sports in college, along with football, and the money the two sports bring in funnels back into the college programs, a point that, by itself, would be noble if not for the fact that corporations suck out every penny they can in the name of college pride.  Hell, the NCAA’s “Senior Class Award,” awarded for outstanding character in senior athletes is even sponsored (brought to you by your local Lowe’s hardware store), but we cry foul when Cam Newton allegedly wants to cash in on even the smallest amount or whenever an argument is to be made about paying college athletes.

In a recent interview on HoopsHype Brandon Jennings said if their were a lockout in 2011 he would attempt to return to Europe where, after not making the grades to enroll in college, he played for a year before being drafted by the Bucks.  After early success began to define his rookie season the question arose as to whether more high school seniors should follow his lead.  Europe, unlike college, allows players a true professional experience where locker rooms are dominated by veteran players, not coaches.  The ego padding disgrace that is college recruiting could be replace by the harsh reality of international basketball, a style far different from what is taught in the AAU and high school systems, essentially creating a humbling classroom for young stars to learn how to work within a professional system.  

Alas, Jennings may have been ahead of his time, seeing as only one player, Jeremy Tyler, followed his lead.  Tyler left the States after finishing his junior year of high school to play in Israel at the age of seventeen, the age most European stars begin their professional careers.  Tyler struggled mightily in Israel, averaging an anemic 2.1 ppg, and quit after only ten games, now playing out the last year before he can enter the NBA draft for a team in Japan’s professional league.  So Jeremy Tyler is now mocked for going against the system, and failing, and what could have been a revolution lays dormant, mistaken as merely a trend.  But what happens if upon entering the NBA next year, supposing there is no lockout, Tyler dominates the rookie field?  Could NBA success for Jeremy Tyler prove the struggles he and Jennings went through internationally are a better means to the NBA ends than college?

Traversing the Downward Trail

Kobe Bryant is coming off his fifth championship season, and has already cemented his legacy as one of the most prolific players in NBA history.  This year, with the affects of age settling in, Kobe begins on the most difficult journey a player who has impacted the game like he has must travel.  Kobe must now decide whether remaining relevant for the remainder of his career is worth the cost of the alpha-male psyche which defined the prime of his career.

Kobe has already proven a willingness to change the physical aspects of his game, learning a new offensive strategy last year focused more on backing defenders into the post than beating them off the ball.  This shift allowed Kobe to compensate for the athletic deterioration stemming from age and gave him one more year of individual dominance.  This season Kobe will once again be staring at a crossroads in his career but unlike the last, his transformation must be psychological in order to become the leader his team needs.

Kobe is now entering the winter of a long and prolific career, but winter, for him, presents not a struggle but an opportunity.  For Kobe to remain relevant going forward he must shift roles and allow the Lakers offense to rely on Pau Gasol as their first option which would relegate Kobe to a position he has not seen since the days of Shaquille O’Neal.  For a shift of such magnitude to occur Kobe must readily relinquish the need to control the Lakers destiny which has dominated the post-Shaq Lakers.

Throughout his career Kobe has matured into one of the biggest offensive threats in the NBA.  He teamed with Shaq to win three titles in his early career, carried otherwise poor Lakers teams upon Shaq’s departure and later carried his team to the NBA Finals in each of the past three years, winning two championships.

Kobe has proven time and again his relentless aggressiveness in the face of competition, but much like Dr. Jeckyll had Mr. Hyde there have been repercussions for such passion.  Kobe’s Achilles Heel manifests itself in a lack of selflessness in the face of pressure or defeat.  While his Game 7 performance (6-24 from the field with 2 assists) was enough to win the championship, through the compensation of his teammates, it is unlikely this individual style will allow Kobe and the Lakers to stay competitive moving forward. 

Kobe has spent his career giving argument to his being one of the best to ever play the game and through his career his sheer ability has transcended the negative aspects derived from the individualistic tendencies he has struggled with.  Now in his fifteenth season with the Lakers, and coming off a third knee surgery, it is almost certain he no longer possesses the physical prowess to play the game which once defined his career.

There are now two directions the Lakers could potentially take moving forward.  If Kobe attempts once again to force his will as the alpha-dog the Lakers may still make the playoffs, but it is safe to say such a style will move them toward the average, relieving them of the crown worn by champions.  

It is the other direction that should scare everyone in the Western Conference.  If Kobe is willing to shift focus of the Lakers’ offense to Pau Gasol, one of the best big-men in the league, we could see the most multi-dimensional team in the league.  Gasol is an amazing passer from the forward and center position.  Funneling the offense through him will rely on offensive productivity of the Lakers as a team and while this means a diminished role for Kobe, opening up the floor will create easier scoring opportunities.

The question we will see the Lakers attempting to answer throughout the regular season is whether Kobe is ready to accept this new role.

In a profession based on such physicality as basketball there should be within our greatest athletes the knowledge of the immediacy of change which accompanies age.  What if that lack of self-awareness, however, is what separates the great outliers from those who encompass the average?  Is it not unlike the trade-offs artists or musicians, those who spent a lifetime striving to achieve in such abstract worlds, must make in order to be immortalized in greatness?

The world is not lacking in great athletes and in order to play in the NBA one must hit the genetic lottery of height, strength and speed.  So millions are genetically whittled into thousands and those who then couple genetics with ability make up the landscape of the NBA.  Moving further it could be assumed, all things being equal (genetics and ability), it is the difference in an athlete’s mentality which separates the outliers who we consider among the greatest to those content within the average.  Robertson, Jordan, Russell, Magic, Bird etc. possessed within themselves the passion to become the best and by doing so changed the way we look at basketball.

While artists and musicians perfect a more abstract craft it is this same drive that separates the likes of The Rolling Stones or Martin Scorsese as outliers in their respective professions.  However, the drive to achieve at such a high level mutates one’s mental stability because such singularity of desire must come at the cost of the well-roundedness achieved by the societal average of the time.

Mick Jagger and Keith Richards are accredited with some of the most outlandish and uncompromising music of their generation.  While their music pushed the boundaries of acceptability of subject matter in pop culture of their time, it came at the dangerous cost of sobriety.  It seemed their willingness to ingest enough narcotics to produce catatonia in most human beings outlined the lifestyle necessary for them to create the music they were producing during their pinnacle.  The Stones finally sobered up (to an extent), but it cost them the wildness that dominated their music during the height of their pinnacle.  While they still tour today, the impact they created during their peak was far to firmly rooted in their outlandish lifestyle and thusly diminished upon personal maturity.

During his amazing reign Martin Scorsese created films highlighted by the richness and depth of his character studies.  There was never a need for much in the way of plot as long as his passion to create protagonists out of mentally unstable war heros, alcoholic boxers or mobsters remained.  One day Scorsese reached his peak at which time the comforts of money and age began to wear away at this need.  When he decided to replace the rawness of his early days with the intellectualism we associate with his later films he remained relevant far after his apex had come and gone.

Kobe Bryant has reached the top of the mountain, the younger ranks have matured and he no longer possesses the ability to dominate as he once did.  The decisions he makes in the next two years, whether to subscribe to a different, team oriented game or continue as a one-man army, could affect the next half-decade for the Lakers.  If he is willing to surrender control of his team by becoming a secondary option than the Lakers will have an offensive juggernaut able to compete with anyone in the NBA even into Kobe’s late thirties.  However, just as easily Kobe could lose this struggle, refuse to change and watch his prominence quickly dwindle into irrelevance.

Only time will tell.

In the Eyes of a Fandom

Now that the NBA season is officially underway I can’t help but wonder how long the 2010 offseason will remain in our collective conscience.  I spend most of the offseason filling the void created from a lack of basketball by sitting on the couch with my dog watching the Atlanta Braves not concerning myself with offseason moves until late August.

This offseason changed those rules.  This year I was never allowed time away from basketball, there was no natural flow to the offseason and instead of burning me out before the NBA season even began (the side effect I expected) my excitement level has reached a high I never thought possible.  

I was sitting on my couch resting after a pick up game with friends when an incoming text simply read “LeBron to Miami.”  I had decided not to watch the hour long interview for no other reason but a lack of interest.  My friends in downtown Raleigh know me as an obsessive NBA fan, for most the only one they know, so there was no doubt I would get a few messages on the fate of the 2010 basketball season.  Watching an hour long special for what I could needed three minutes seemed superfluous, besides the real stories are always in the aftermath.

The endless attention leveed upon LeBron James, Cleveland, and Miami was to be expected, but what surprised me the most was the vitriolic response by a sports media thought to be fair and without bias.  The drastic windfall of popular opinion going against James and in defense of Cleveland over the next few weeks seemed lacking in the temperament normally reserved for quality journalism.  

In fact what we were seeing was major sports journalism reporting through the lens not of a journalist, but a fan.  For the last few months of the offseason major sports media, like most fans, sided with the understandable pity fans felt for the city of Cleveland and thusly allowed themselves to become lopsided at a time of controversy when balanced reporting is needed most.

You see, if tragedies were written on the experience of the sports fan it would  begin in fair Cleveland, where we lay our scene.  The Shot, The Drive, Cliff Lee, and CC Sabathia only create the short list of Cleveland’s sports battles.  The problem is LeBron, while being a hometown boy, is a name not deserving of this list.  Tragedies befall those who invite them and had Cavs management created a clear, ambitious system where LeBron was allowed to flourish with the proper role players this discussion would not be necessary.  No matter one’s personal opinion on the way LeBron left, his reasons for leaving, mainly the belief that moving to a bigger market and winning championships would ultimately expand his global brand, had been building for his seven year under inept management decisions during his tenure as a Cavalier.

I’ve spent many nights in dark bars discussing the eternal struggle between art and commerce.  Art is created not just out of beauty and passion but out of the struggle to bring out the parts of us we keep hidden.  At times it is meant to offend, hurt or insult its audience because there is no other way to create the desired effect.  That being said, artists need to eat and thus begins the fickle relationship with what seems to be art’s diametric brethren, commerce.  Unlike art, however, the deepest struggle between basketball and commerce lay not in the heart of the athlete but in that of the fan. 

Basketball can be transcendent and it can be beautiful, but basketball cannot be art.  We buy the tickets, the jerseys, the TV packages and in such action a relationship with commerce is formed.  In the modern age of professional sports, after free agency allow players proper freedom, fans have come to understand that it is the front of the jersey that matters.  The names on the back will always come and go.  In sports the struggle with lady commerce is manifested when she is forgotten and we mistake freedom of movement for betrayal.  

Basketball’s power, much like the power of all sports, is derived not from its daily exhibition but in its relationship to who we were.  Basketball is the sport of boys and girls, of fathers and sons, and childhood days of innocent desires.  As passionate fans our love for basketball began on the playgrounds of youth only to mature throughout a lifetime.  One reason we watch professional sports is because in the act of cheering for the teams of our youth we are connected to a time more carefree, not weighted down by the mundane necessities of adulthood.

LeBron left Cleveland to join his friends Dwane Wade and Chris Bosh but the major factors in his decision were business related.  In what many viewed as choosing a team for such cold reasons, LeBron sacrificed the hopes and expectations of his hometown fans in a very controversial way for the sake of that practicality. 

It is in juxtaposing LeBron’s business decision with its visceral reaction where we understand the tenuous line between commerce and basketball.  In the first few months there was very little major media focus on the disappointment in Cleveland, the celebration in Miami, or the future of two organizations heading, because of one man, in two different directions.  Instead there were editorials on what was seen as justified, hyperbolic rage of Cavs fans, talking heads relegating LeBron’s future legacy to second class status and an interesting sympathy for the scathing letter from Cavs owner Dan Gilbert questioning out right his former employee’s character as a person.  In essence the sports world was attacking the character of a player who put business in front of a false belief of loyalty because we allowed the childhood innocence of basketball to usurp a practical, individual business decision.

But when dark clouds settle in for what seems to be the long haul there appears the proverbial silver lining.  Last year, Kevin Durant became the youngest player to win the scoring title.  He took leadership of a second rate USA team during the FIBA World Championships to take the gold medal all while signing a five year extension with Oklahoma City (the smallest market in the NBA).  This move will allow Thunder management to build a team around him without concern of the star’s immediate departure.  He agreed to appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated only if his teammates could join him, and he now seems destined to be anointed the next great hope.  

LeBron James will still dominate our consciousness this season, but it will be Kevin Durant’s year to earn the title of NBA’s Golden Boy.  However, I cannot help but wonder whether the silver lining really is the first sign of brighter days ahead or the sliver of false hope which ultimately leads us down the same dark path again.  

It is not fair to say that the entirety of sports media acted the same, but when I sit back and view the last few months I cannot help but find the words of many unfortunately outweighing the rationality and reasoning of the few.  I can only hope that when the next big controversy comes a long, and it may not be for a while, that we allow ourselves to take a step back from being a fan enough so we may view such a story with the depth of reason it deserves.

Clinging to the Crutch of Nostalgia

The first thing you notice is the Southern drawl. Then you read about him. You see he was a former wrestling promoter and he’s nicknamed Moose. He talks of the way things were back before things got complicated, and you remember this conversation happening all the time. You think back to the old man sitting on the front porch telling you how things used to be, the only other audience in attendance are the crickets providing background chatter on a warm Southern night.

You are jarred out of this memory by a new voice. The voice of a stranger who doesn’t seem to belong in the narrative you have creatively imagined. This new voice is questioning the way things were, challenging the memories the old man seems to cling to so fondly. He doesn’t believe in the singularity of the man’s remembrance, and you start listening closer and start to critically analyze the man’s agenda:

There will be criminal background checks and drug screening. There will be no tattoos. There will be no crotch grabbing, no throwing middle fingers to fans, and no fighting in the stands. There will be no asians, no latinos. There will be no foreigners. Most importantly there will be no blacks.

Modern Times, Athletes

Somewhere throughout modern history it happened, and for better or for worse it cannot be reversed. We began to idolize sports, and in that act we created the modern athlete. He (and later she) amazed us, held us breathless while teetering upon that thin line of talent that, at its finest moments, transcends into an artistry whose beauty was shared not just by the elite, but by all those who took the time to watch. Our new found artists, those whose talents (by pure mastery of their craft) were able to, at once, define the simplicity and complexity of sport became legends almost over night.
We then watched sport develop from pure art to business, hastened by television which brought this art into our homes. This big business led to big money, which led to big salaries and big scrutiny. The athlete was now in the highest tax bracket, as well as the constant spotlight. We set a higher standard for the athlete, we created the belief that our national moral identity was predicated upon the off the court actions of the athlete. The problem then became that of the fallout when those standards were not met. We have dinner party discussions on the arrogance of Michael Jordan, the infidelity of Tiger Woods and the fragile relationship between players and fans which one day, at the Palace at Auburn Hills, was broken in a way that is always in the back of our mind.
We expect professional athletes to be role models to the children who watch, in revery, the games they have mastered. These games played by men, most of whom not just larger than life in stature but personality, are also the games of children. American children, and those throughout the world, begin playing sports at an early age. Sports are used to indoctrinate early lessons of respect, discipline, and teamwork. It is assumed that the professional athlete is the matured embodiment of these characteristics, aged and fermented over the years through the high school and collegiate levels and now ready to assume their role as the example to be looked upon by the future of our society.
Sports also make our world smaller. The invention of television, and with that televised sports, has given American society a modern idea of the collective experience. Live sporting events have gained cultural relevance by allowing everyone, everywhere to gaze upon moments of elite athletic prowess and grace together. A white child in Mobile, Alabama shares the same transcendent experience of the buzzer beater, the winning home run, the last minute drive, down four with two minutes left, as a black child living on the South-side of Chicago and this in turn gives us hope. This rare and fleeting interconnectedness is what makes us believe in sports, and its message of unity, courage, and team work are the contributions our simple games bring to society.
Yet anyone who has studied, in any detail, the make-up of professional sports understands the inherent flaws of this message. At the end of the day professional sports are just that: a profession where money is one of, if not the biggest motivating factor. Contracts dictate the importance of an athlete, where he who makes the most is he who bears the burden of responsibility and possibly the resentment of teammates. In a profession such as sports an athlete’s worth is quantified in the juxtaposition of competing contracts. The true performance evaluation being in off-season renegotiations.
Teams are made of individuals, and individuals do not always buy in to the theory of the team. Buying in can mean relinquishing control of the uniqueness of personality for a common good (the team) which is not always achieved. Individuals come from backgrounds, and these backgrounds aren’t always what society deems normal, which is where the true contradiction in sports begins to manifest. In a league such as the NBA the contradiction has always been in the dichotomy of athlete and fan. How does one sell a league whose athletes are predominately black, to “Middle America” which is predominately white when the norms of these two demographics present such a volatile fault line? Society expects modern athletes to act within the realm of modern morality, often set by the norms of “Middle America,” which is most often qualified by the mainstream media’s assumptions (often educated) of those norms.
The problem we face with applying these norms is when those who are under scrutiny have developed their individual moral code outside of, and often without view of the mainstream experience. Those athletes who cannot easily transition from what they were in youth to what is currently expected of them are often the most denigrated.
It is this moral gray area that has always interested me the most about professional sports, especially the NBA, and what will be the driving factor behind the topics of discussion on this website. My motivation lies in studying the issues facing today’s professional sports environment, and attempt to logically argue the unpopular side. While I will do my best not to support either side I am only human and am sure some biases will subtly present themselves. I also understand that, by definition, a moral gray area is one in which everyone will have a different opinion and many will not agree with my logistics. My goal in creating this website is to use a creative outlet to provide the my readers with a new spin on the dinner party conversation. It is not in the persuasion of opinion where my objective lies, but in the ability to create debate and allow readers to leave this website comprehending a new depth to issues that were once viewed as rigidly simplistic.