OK, just two more

Just two more mentions of basketball this month. Well, I'm sure I'll have something to say leading up to or immediately following Thursday's NBA draft, but I wanted to highlight a couple articles that even readers who aren't NBA fans might find interesting:

• An article about Len Bias, the #2 pick in the 1986 draft, and someone whose name comes up a lot at this time of year. For those who don't remember, Bias was the University of Maryland power forward drafted by the Celtics, who was expected to lengthen the Bird/McHale/Parrish dynasty, only to die of a cocaine overdose the day after the draft. I don't really remember this happening; I remember knowing that it was going on, and, although I was only 7, I suppose I might have remembered him from that year's Final Four, which I always watched, even then. I definitely didn't remember that his brother died a few years later, or even really pick up on the other Bias narratives at the time, other than, aside from the obvious tragedy, that this sort of doomed the Celtics for awhile, and that this was the downfall for the idea of college athletics as pure and innocent (despite how often college hoops is lauded over the NBA with a similar valence). The author of the piece, Michael Weinreb, spends time with Bias' mother, as well as a friend of the late Jay Bias, Len's younger brother, who was incarcerated for crack possession (given a sentence that Weinreb points out was three times as long for those of most murderers). As this might suggest, Weinreb ties the Bias story to America's response to crack (Bias OD'ed on powder cocaine, but the death of a young Black man to coca fed legislators' drive to lock up crack users), as well as presenting a fascinating case study of a young athlete caught between life stages and historical eras.


• A NY Times piece about Brandon Jennings, a top high school point guard I'd only recently been hearing about, expected to spend a year playing professionally in Europe. (Here's the King Kaufman column that lead me to it.) This is of course following the, in my opinion, dodgy collusion between the NBA, NCAA, and NBA players' union, to force elite American HS basketball to spend a year working for a college program, where they can risk injury and please boosters under the nurturing, watchful eye of the US sports media. Instead, Jennings will be paid to play, and Jennings and Kaufman assume that his game will develop and he will mature unproblematically, presumably while "dating" supermodels and developing a taste for fine art. I like both these articles and love Jennings' guts and drive here, but I can't help but notice a little idealizing of Ye Olde Worlde in both articles. You think he'll be safe from leeches and hangers on in Europe? He's going to develop financial and social savvy just by walking amongst sophisticated, art-appreciating Europeans? (I don't want to accuse the Times writer, William Rhoden, about whom I know nothing, or Kaufman, who I think is a thoughtful, enjoyable read and probably has a great social conscience, of racism, but I can't help but wonder if many other Americans who think this will be great for the kid think it'll be great for him to not be around so many other Black people.) I'd also like to add, in response to the positive references to the Euro leagues in both of these articles, we're seeing a pretty steady decline since 2001 (I'm referring to the draft that brought in Tony Parker, Pau Gasol [who, at least in this years NBA finals, decided to live up every negative stereotype about European athletes], and Mehmet Okur) in the quality of players who've come from the European leagues, at least in contrast to how highly they've been coveted. European players have been getting drafted way too high ever since the Spurs and the Mavs started making huge leaps with Parker and Dirk Nowitzki, and I have to say I disagree with the notion that Jennings will be playing a higher level of game in Spain than he would at a Big East, ACC, Big Te(leve)n, etc, school. But he won't be contributing to the bogus claim that he'd be there because we all value education. (For the record, I really like college basketball, I just prefer the game itself in the League.)

Anyway, enjoy.

misc

Shaquille O'Neal is the greatest rapper alive, because "great" means "large." Him asking Kobe how it tastes was horrifying enough the first time. Maybe he should stick to policework in the offseason.

It was nice to see George Carlin's "Baseball vs Football" routine again yesterday, and driving home past The Minister's house on my way home last night I remembered his reference to, in a bit about PC language in the 90s, "the openly Black Louis Farrakhan" in one of his bits.

Isn't Team Basketball USA a little... short? And are we supposed to be happy with a coach whose last teams have recently been eliminated from tournaments by the likes of Greece and Virginia Commonwealth? I'm sorry, but when it comes to basketball, I am a freaking nationalist, and I will be very annoyed if we fail to win the gold medal again this year. Why? I have no idea. I don't care about the Olympics; the US's poor showing in international basketball just irks me for reasons I'm not interested in exploring. So there.

Oh yeah, I'm starting to feel self-conscious about how much I use semi-colons:

The semicolon has spent the last century as a fussbudget mark. Somerset Maugham and George Orwell disdained it; Kurt Vonnegut once informed a Tufts University crowd that "All [semicolons] do is show that you've been to college." New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia's favorite put-down for egghead bureaucrats who got in his way was "semicolon boy." And though semicolons have occasionally made news—tariff bills have imploded over their misplacement, and a 1927 execution hinged on the interpretation of a
semicolon—the last writers to receive much notice for semicolon use have been a New York City Transit employee and the Son of Sam. In 1977 the NYPD speculated that "the killer could be a freelance journalist" because of his "use of a semicolon" in his taunting letters. (Decades later, columnist Jimmy Breslin still marveled that "Berkowitz is the only murderer I ever heard of who knew how to use a semicolon.")

I've been called worse than a "fussbudget," I guess.

"anything is possible!"

I haven't been writing a damn thing, paperwork excluded, for the last week, so, yeah. Whatever. I don't know why, maybe I'm just cranky, maybe I just have nothing to say. A lot of things in my life seem to be ending right now, and not many things beginning in their place. Times of transition, self-doubt, disappointment and a sense of opportunities lost, blah blah.

So I'm just going to briefly go back to last week's big story in my life, the NBA Finals; specifically, the much-discussed Kevin Garnett interview. Many cynical viewers I've talked to and read felt there was something distastefully performative in KG's display. My take was perhaps more naive; I was genuinely moved (as pointed out to me by a thoughtful observer, Garnett's accomplishment and his place in life are pretty meaningful to me right now, given my sense of transition), and felt like it was one of the more striking emotional displays I'd seen televised before. It felt like he was simultaneously emotionally regressing and growing and being pulled in a million different directions at once.

Whatever was going on with KG at the time, after hearing other peoples' more cynical takes on the interview and his season-long tendency to very publicly, before games and at key moments in front of fans and teammates, acting out exhuberantly, got me thinking the role of emotion in team sports. The friend I referred to parenthetically in the previous paragraph suggested that, from a group dynamics perspective, KG had been "holding" a lot of emotion for his team. Basically, the psychology of groups suggest that, within groups, individuals take on certain roles for the group, be they leader or scapegoat, the soother, the leader, etc. It's easier for us to notice this in other people's families, or for therapists to see it in a group, but I haven't heard it mentioned in professional sports, and I think KG this season has been a great example.

I'm often irritated by how sportswriters and fans single out athlete's behavior for analysis- I'm not talking about Kobe in Colorado or other extreme examples, just how athletes are often described as pouty or unpleasant, or "down-to-earth" and a team player. Part of what makes this irritating and stupid is how tied up in race this tends to be, but I'm not going into that here. But if we take Garnett 07-08 as a mini case study, I think we might consider how displays of intense emotion on the part of athletes can sometimes say more about the team and the moment than about the individual. One of the things that was compelling to me about this last year's Celtics team is the flip side of what a lot of people whose opinions I value dislike-- they're a little bit cobbled together and stylistically uneven. Although they played defense with an almost hive-like unity, they're players who for the most part just started playing together in the last season, which has often been reflected in their serviceable if uninspiring offensive play.

What interests me about a team like this is how difficult it must be, in a behind-the-scenes kind of way, to try to get a team like this to unite and win. Star players like Pierce, Garnett, and Allen, united in a common purpose but lacking one singular narrative to unite them. Their most compelling narratives (Pierce's long history in Boston and his 2000 brush with death, Garnett's conflicted and painful departure from Minnesota, Allen's family turmoil and uneven career) were, other than that of PP, intense, but having little or nothing to do with the grand narratives of the franchise and city for whom they played. Garnett's physically, affectively, and verbal veering and swooning in the post-game interview reflected this. I guess it enabled us-- disappointed not-so-young-anymore adults, pained Timberwolves and Lakers fans, vindicated Boston fans-- to fit it with our own narratives of what this season meant. Was it insincere? I don't think that question is useful very often at all, and it isn't for looking at KG's interview. Whether it was a display or an affectation doesn't take away from the meaningfulness of it all. I don't want to say that it had to happen, but it fit.

I used to stay up reading the Book of Revelation

(RIP Wisconsin Dells)

Did anyone read this essay by Iain McEwan, from a couple of weeks ago in the Guardian? I've just skimmed over it, but want to give it a good read sometime He seems to manage to express a very calm, thoughtful understanding of the appeal of apocalyptic thinking, locating it in a seemingly eternal place where the incomprehensibility of mortality, the fear of the unknown, and real danger meet:

In The Sense of an Ending , Frank Kermode proposes that the enduring quality,
the vitality of the Book of Revelation suggests a "consonance with our more
naive requirements of fiction". We are born, as we will die, in the middle of
things, in the "middest". To make sense of our span, we need what he calls
"fictive concords with origins and ends. 'The End', in the grand sense, as we
imagine it, will reflect our irreducibly intermediary expectations." What
could grant us more meaning against the abyss of time than to identify our own
personal demise with the purifying annihilation of all that is. Kermode quotes
with approval from Wallace Stevens - "the imagination is always at the end
of an era".

(McEwan includes a nice little methodological aside, in reference to polls about American religiosity that secular elites such as myself on both sides of the Atlantic titter over, like, as he puts it, "Atheist pornography":

It might be worth retaining a degree of scepticism about these
polling figures. For a start, they vary enormously - one poll's 90 per cent is
another's 53 per cent. From the respondent's point of view, what is to be gained
by categorically denying the existence of God to a complete stranger with a
clipboard? And those who tell pollsters they believe that the Bible is the
literal word of God from which derive all proper moral precepts, are more likely
to be thinking in general terms of love, compassion and forgiveness rather than
of the slave-owning, ethnic cleansing, infanticide, and genocide urged at
various times by the jealous God of the Old Testament.)

and as long as I've mentioned basketball today...

from Free Darko, a link to an interview with, and the blog of, professional basketball legend and cultural icon Spencer Haywood. (Haywood took the NBA to court in order to be able to play pro ball before his college class graduated; in his case, after his sophomore year. Haywood also led the 1968 US Olympic Basketball team to a gold medal.) Haven't read the blog yet, but in the interview, the man suggests that Carmelo needs to get rid of those braids. Oh yeah, and start playing tough in the paint.

For the writers

First of all, since I decided I'm going to get serious about my dissertation proposal, one of the more subtle procrastination tactics my unconscious is employing is geeking out over recording gear. This task took me to the self-described "technical communication blog" http://www.idratherbewriting.com/. Now that I've decided to be less technophobic, I've decided that I need to incorporate some understanding of technology and communication into my worldview. Anyway, this blog led me to this post about essay writing, which got my mind going a little bit. This, combined with a meeting with a professor who offered a few very specific suggestions about exercizes to generate ideas and writing, have me feeling much more mentally equipped than I did this morning.

Unfortunately, game 4 in LA is likely to wipe out any productivity that otherwise may have occurred this evening.

"May your therapist always believe your explanations of why you're unhappy"

I just made up a fake old curse. You can easily turn it into a fake old blessing by inserting "not" before "always," if you're feeling nice.

What do I mean by this curse? I mean that, as a therapist, you might be performing a disservice by accepting your clients' explanations for why they feel the way they do. This seems obvious to anyone thinking in terms of psychological defenses (though I'd suspect that a lot of therapists, myself included, might take it too far, and are more likely to attribute something to defensiveness than to self-insight, but that's another matter), but not to a British pop psychologist.

From salon.com:

An expert has proclaimed that single women, despite their protestations to
the contrary, are completely miserable. According to Pam Spurr, an author and psychologist, single women who assert they are happy with their lives despite "their crushing loneliness and desperation" are not merely deluded, but outright lying. How does she know? Body language.
Upon talking with a woman at a party, who had every semblance of confidence, maturity and fulfillment (every semblance, that is, except for a ring on the all-important finger), the subject of sex and marriage came up. The sex therapist recounts:
"She immediately described herself as happily single. And yet her body language told another story: Chloe crossed her arms defensively over her chest until I just wanted to shout: 'Yes my dear, now try pulling another one.'"
Hmm. You don't suppose her body language seemed defensive because she realized she was talking to a hostile busybody eager to make snap judgments about her life on the spot and write disparagingly about her in an international newspaper, do you?

The Salon poster also makes the excellent point that, in using her patients as her other source of evidence that single women are unhappy, she's using a very skewed sample. (She's also using a skewed sample in that she's only looking at successful professional women in their 20s, 30s and 40s.)
What the poster doesn't point out is that the psychologist in question seems to be taking at face value her patients' assessment of why they are unhappy. This isn't neccessarily a bad thing, but living in a society in which happiness through relationships is such a major talking point, and participating in a sector of the economy (psychotherapy) that produces many ready-made solutions and snap analyses for these problems, patients like those seen by the psychologist in question have a ready-made, easily presented explanation for their malaise. Taking this explanation for granted might be a disservice to her patients, and it's certainly a disservice to anyone listening to your explanation of widespread social phenomena.

(The issue [mostly] overlooked in this very class- and age-specific discussion: are ways of living that are adaptive to upwardly-mobile professionals in their 20s and 30s maladaptive afterward? [The psychologist would be receptive to this argument, and hints at it.] Or are enough people taking on these ways of living that they will develop, as a cohort, adaptive new responses to their situation as they reach their 40s, 50s, and upward [to which I think the salon poster would be receptive], and what are married rich people unhappy about?)

File under "hilarious, not surprising"

From science blog Cognitive Daily:

...David McCabe and Alan Castel have taken this work on the acceptance of
neuroscience to a new level: now they've got pictures! They asked 156 students
at Colorado State University to read three different newspaper articles about
brain imaging studies. The articles were completely fake, and they all discussed
brain imaging, but one of the articles included only text, one included a bar
graph showing brain-scan results, and one showed pictures of brains. The
articles were about three different topics, but an equal number of students saw
each article with text only, the graph, or the brain image...
The articles accompanied by brain images were rated significantly higher than the other articles, despite the fact that the fake claim in each article wasn't actually
supported by the fake evidence, in whatever form it was presented.

OK, I am generally hostile to studies based on how undergrads perform in lab studies, blah blah, etc., but this kind of stuff still cracks me up.

Only writing for one month, and I already have a jinx to call my own.

So far, every time I've posted about something as an inevitability, it hasn't occurred.

I wonder what President McCain, NBA Finals MVP Kobe Bryant, and my ex-wife all think about that.

The Wall Street Journal is doing sports now?

Especially since the years 2000-2003, I have nothing but hateful, bitter scorn to how the major US news outlets handle important news, such as, just off the top of my head, elections, terrorist attacks, and wars. The disgust I feel for how vapid and uncritical most editors and talking heads have been in their handling of the emergence and unfolding of the Bush presidency is probably best articulated here. It makes me want to shudder and puke just thinking about it.

Anywho, for reasons like those, I've always bought into the cliche that the sports page is the only honest part of the newspaper.

Paradoxically, I think a lot of this who feel this way also feel some sort of sadness about the much-trumpeted decline of the newspaper. Despite the, to be honest, partial hatred I feel toward many writers and editors of newspapers who helped drum up support for attacking Iraq (and Iran), I'd still like to see these newspapers become what they were in our great imagined past when journalists were journalists and men were men. And all that. We'd love to see widely-circulated, thoughtful reporting of and commentary on important events.
Where am I going with all this? For starters, much-discussed changes in how people get their news has led to some potentially thoughtful (if sanctimonious) debate about the role of access to high-power sources (like traditional news outlets have); specifically, whether this leads journalists to serve as mouthpieces of these sources, or whether it actually gives journalists access to more important information.
I tend to avoid self-important discussions about journalism, but one domain in which I can stomach this kind of talk is, no surprise here, the world of sports. I think it's great that websites like deadspin and others bring an outsider's perspective to the world of sports; likewise, I like to get the up-close perspective that connected journalists at places like ESPN can provide. Ideally, the outsiders can keep the journalists honest and in check, and the journalists can be informed by the thoughts and concerns articulated by outsiders.

So, despite the nausea I felt (due to the parallels between "sports leagues" and political and corporate administrations) in reading the following quote...,

Q: Are sports leagues too controlling in imposing rules on how they can be covered?
A: From a journalist's perspective, absolutely. As Pat Jordan wrote, the
access gets worse all the time and the fans get less out of the coverage because
it's forced to be more superficial. Interviews are shorter, if they can be
landed at all, and the P.R. folks -- not all, but many -- are exerting way too
much control. I understand why the leagues and teams do it. They're all in the
media business themselves now, and they're just taking money out of their own
pockets if they let someone else air a press conference they're perfectly
equipped to air themselves. This is pure speculation, but I wonder if there
isn't some connection between this increased restriction and the rise of the
kind of sports gossip that is a legitimate violation of athletes' privacy.

... I have some optimism that the WSJ's resources can enlighten and elevate the level of discourse in the world of sports, which will hopefully draw attention to how much better a job places like the Journal and the Times could handle subjects which are, to me, a lot less fun, but a lot more important.

More questionable developmental thinking in sportswriting

In this week's edition of "the deformed lovechild of free darko and fire joe morgan," let's look at one Miami sportswriter's concerns about all-but-certain top-two NBA draft pick Michael Beasley (I put the stuff in bold):

"I'm still a kid," [Beasley] says. "I'm learning day by day."
...From a personal standpoint, that's comforting, considering the pandemonium he has left in his wake.
No, this is not Caron Butler selling drugs and stashing
guns, only to learn ultimate lessons in solitary confinement.
This, instead, is the kid who sees how far he can push,
without ever pushing too far, the kid who places a dead rat in a teacher's
drawer, who signs his name in as many places as possible in prep school, who wore pajamas to his high school cafeteria, who once put glue on his cousin's underwear, who was suspended from kindergarten — yes, kindergarten — for cutting off a girl's pigtail.
The sum total: Banishment from more high schools than there are grades in
high school. In all, he attended seven schools in five states, a journey that
concluded at Notre Dame Prep in Fitchburg, Mass.
Since high school? Nothing more than a speeding violation.
Of course, "since high school" is just one year ago

I'm going to disregard the "banishment from.. high schools" part, after saying: This refers to a Washington Post article from last year that many people who know Beasley, including many quoted and referenced in the article, misrepresents and takes out of context Beasley's short tenure at these schools. (Basically, what all that boiled down to was the Beasley left schools for a variety of somewhat reasonable basketball reasons; "somewhat reasonable" if we consider the common practice of private high schools recruiting 14 year olds, and adults encouraging said kids to transfer schools for the purpose of increasing their exposure to potential endorsers, etc. Ultimately, Beasley left every school with the endorsement and encouragement of supportive adults in his life, who, while certainly having different priorities than I do, sound like they did care about the kid).

Anyway, let me get this straight. You want your reader be concerned that Beasley has certain, shall we say, temperamental or personality traits that will make his legacy more like that of Derrick Coleman or Vin Baker than Malone/Barkley/McHale/whomever. This is a fair concern, I guess, though I think it has more to do with the fact that, in this draft narrative, the other sure-fire top two 19 year old has been fairly arbitrarily granted the status of "mature, wise, non-uppity player," than anything driven by a realistic assessment of these two very young people.

So yeah, assuming this is a fair concern, assuming that Rose's perceived maturity is more a product of his own psychology than that of a tired old sports narrative that gets trotted out whenever we have to compare two hard-to-compare athletes, let's consider the evidence employed here. The writer uses the redemption of Caron Butler, a Racine, Wisconsin native famously "arrested 15 times before he turned 15." (Oooh! Was he the 7th son of a 7th son? Does he like Iron Maiden as much as I do?) Now the writer seems to assume that it was solitary confinement that redeemed Mr. Butler. While I'd really, really doubt that, let's say that something drastic was required to turn Butler away from his life of "selling drugs and stashing guns." The writer also seems to be assuming that Beasley has lacked this character-developing experience to redeem him from his past sins. I don't think that maturity is dependent on trauma, but I'll buy the fact that many times young athletes who've never heard "no" in their life might need a little extra reality check to be the kind of person we might hope.

The premise that I can't buy, not even for a second, is that any of this stuff Beasley did is all that worrisome. Cutting off a girls' pigtail? Cruel if a teenager does it, creepy if an adult does it. If a kindergartner does it? DUDE. THE KID WAS 5. He had NO IDEA what he was doing. (And what is with "-- yes, kindergarten--?" We're not talking about drug dealing or spousal abuse in kindergarten, which would be truly shocking. But anyway.) Playing a scary prank on a teacher? "Graffito tagging," as Marge Simpson worried about? Wearing pajamas in a high school cafeteria? Would this be the high school he attended that consisted of a basketball team and 12 ESL students that exists as an AAU vehicle, or one of his actual high schools? Either way, WHO CARES? Am I so off-base in thinking that this is fairly average behavior for a bored high school boy?

Even if I am off-base, and I'll admit the dead rat is a little creepy, I don't think that anyone sees these as more worrisome than bringing a gun to school, selling crack, and fathering a child at 14. These were things that Caron Butler did as a kid in Racine, and, by all accounts, he's become not only one of the best players in the Eastern Conference, but a really nice guy. Beasley was a kid who never had structure in his high school life, didn't have age-normative social expectations to make use of, and who responded to being treated like a star/investment in a way that many people would-- pushing limits in a relatively nonmalicious way. Ultimately, Beasley's mischevous response to an unstructured, chaotic environment in his teenage years is useless for predicting future behavior.