The Sports Curmudgeon

The initial outrage over the fight between Indiana Pacers players and fans in Detroit seems to be on the wane just a little bit. Maybe that is because we do not have the videotape of that incident on a continuous loop playing on at least one ESPN channel 24/7. There was a time when I thought that ESPN was going to start a new outlet, ESPN47 devoted entirely to the tape of this event and expressions of righteous indignation by commentators.

Now come the amateur psychologists and sociologists to the scene to explain all of this to us. And the emphasis in that last sentence belongs on the word, “amateur”.
Some of the other folks who have surfaced recently to comment on the incident are using the incident to further some agenda of their own. The union claims that this despotic behavior by David Stern must be opposed and overturned lest it happen to any other player in the league at any time. What nonsense; to avoid a year’s suspension all you have to do is not dash into the stands and foster mayhem on the paying customers. Phil Mushnick of the NY Post attributed no small measure of the blame in this matter to the media – and NBC in specific – for glorifying athletic antisocial behavior. Why NBC? Because NBC fostered the XFL along with the WWE folks and Mushnick is convinced that the WWE is a font of evil with no social redeeming value. [I agree it has no social redeeming value, but it is not an evil of Biblical proportion!] A talking head that I do not have a name for said that this incident would be used by the league to “outsource” jobs from African-Americans to white European players. Folks, all of this kind of stuff is out there only because the speaker/writer wants face time on the news to push his own agenda. See this stuff for what it is, please. You can politely call it ovine offal.

Let me explain that I understand that Ron Artest and others involved here did not grow up in the coddled and insular environment depicted in Leave It To Beaver. I understand that he and the others have become economically successful in life by excelling in a sport. And in Artest’s case specifically, one avenue to his excellence has been the ferocity and high emotional level at which he plays that sport. I understand that the circumstances of that game and the confrontation Artest had just experienced with Ben Wallace would have set his adrenal glands on “high output”.

And I also understand that what he did was wrong.

Even if I were to accept as a proven fact that all the fans involved in the confrontation and the “beer tossing” were drunk, that does not raise the level of justification for what Artest or any of his teammates did. In fact, it might diminish the justification because if the fans were really drunk, that condition might reduce the actual “imminent danger” they might pretend to have found themselves in. It is not a huge stretch of imagination for me to believe that alcohol-induced thought impairment played a role in the fans’ behavior that night just as it is not much of a stretch of imagination for me to believe that this was an over-reaction by a bunch of egomaniacal, self-absorbed antisocial twits. Come to think of it, that last description might also apply to the fans involved here too. And for the record, I have no inkling as to the BAC levels of any of the participants in this melee and have seen nothing resembling evidence on this matter.

I don’t pretend to be an expert on hip-hop culture – which seems to be a significant element of this incident based solely on the number of people who rise to decry it or defend it in relation to what happened. And please do not send me any treatises on hip-hop culture; if I really wanted to know the nuances of it, I’d have gone and sought out knowledge in that area years ago. But from my admittedly meager understanding and based on the comments of other commentators regarding the near-riot, here are two elements of hip-hop culture that are important:

1. Respect is demanded from everyone.

2. “Getting paid” is a critical element.

Without any deep contextual basis on which to found these next remarks, let me say that these two elements are at the core of my growing disaffection with the NBA.

For background purposes only, I am an avid basketball fan. I’ve played the game and I officiated the game for 37 years when it became obvious that my playing “career” had hit the ceiling. [And it was a low ceiling indeed!] I have attended thousands of games and I have watched more games than that on TV. I really love basketball. Yet, you have seen me write more than a few times that regular season NBA games are unwatchable and meaningless. And those two nominally “critical” elements of hip-hop culture are a significant part of my problem and growing disaffection with the NBA game.

I believe that one should “get paid” for performance and not for potential. That’s just me; but since I am the “customer” in this situation, I get to define what I think is worthy of my spending my money for. Anyone else is entitled to their own opinions here and their own criteria for spending their money, but just as my criteria ought not to apply to anyone else, mine will remain of my own choosing. The NBA has a significant fraction of its players who are getting paid for reasons that are not clear to me and I am cognizant of the fact that it is my money, which is being used to pay them.

When I watch NBA games, I see players who have fundamental flaws in their abilities and who do not hustle and who do not play “team basketball”. I believe that they do not do these things because they realize that to “get paid” they need only to do a few “spectacular things” that will get them on the highlight reels and make them the focus of media attention and discussion. So they stand around when someone else has the ball and do not expend much energy playing defense – lest it be unavailable when their moment of “spectacularity” presents itself – and they certainly will not assist anyone else to do anything spectacular that might result in someone else getting paid. NBA players do seem to understand at a spinal level the law of conservation of matter as it applies here; owners can’t pay two players with the same money. So when someone else fulfills his need to “get paid” that diminishes the pool of money left available for all the other players to “get paid”.

I have made fun of and have had little good to say about the WNBA. I am not about to change that here. I still do not enjoy watching WNBA games because it looks like a men’s game where all the players are competing whilst knee-deep in Jell-O. But there is a real lesson that 80% of the NBA players can learn if they were forced to watch WNBA games – and if they would dare to open their minds sufficiently to believe that there was something left for them to learn about basketball. The women of the WNBA play hard all the time. They do not have the physical skills to make the games exciting; there is no “spectacularity”. But none of the women on the court “dog it” at either end of the floor. In the NBA, dogging it is the rule and not the exception.

And that brings me to the other point of hip-hop culture that is important here. Players demand respect and find “disrespect” in the actions and the postures and the words of others on the players’ own terms. They get to define what “disrespect” is and that becomes the justification for whatever retaliation might evolve. OK, let me say this as clearly as I can to the NBA players and the union leaders and the league officers and the corporate sponsors and advertisers:

The players and the game played by the NBA as of now “disrespect” me - and like-minded fans. All of you demand that I pay significant amounts of money to see games and what you give me is half-hearted effort by a majority of players in the vast majority of games. That treats me - and like-minded fans - as a bunch of ignorant dupes who are worthy only of being milked as a cash cow.

I don’t find that respectful. I don’t like being disrespected. I will also retaliate for this demonstrated lack of respect. Deal with it.

Don’t call Homeland Security. I’m not going to bomb an arena to show my disrespect. But I am going to withhold my economic support. And if more and more people are drawn to that conclusion, the economic house of cards on which the NBA is built will come tumbling down.

Memo to players: If that is too abstruse for you to follow since most of you have not invested any intellectual energy in educational activities, let me translate for you - - you are going to stop getting paid.

Memo to union officials: Your jobs will be rendered useless.

Memo to owners: Your multi-million dollar toys might just become valueless.

This has nothing to do with race; it has everything to do with performance and behavior on the basketball court, which is what I am asked to pay money to watch and enjoy. I’m not psychoanalyzing players; I’m merely observing what they do during the time they purport to entertain me. They have used the justification that they are entertainers and are therefore qualified to receive the same huge economic rewards that other entertainers in the movie and/or music industry get for their performances. Well, if I were to accept that argument from them for a moment let me observe that entertainers who give half-hearted efforts most of the time would soon be off the “A-List”. Entertainers don’t generally have multi-year guaranteed contracts. And if Bruce Springsteen – to pick a singer at random – were to go on a concert tour and merely hum the tunes for half of the songs that he performed, the audiences would be unhappy and would diminish quickly.

The NBA will get my money when it starts to show me a bit of respect. And a major part of that respect will come in the form of not treating me merely as a source of money. If I pay to see 48 minutes of basketball, I expect – no I demand – 48 minutes of full effort on the part of the ten players on the court. That is what shows respect for me – the customer.

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…