#1
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In the downtown district of a small midwestern city lies a hundred year old YMCA with two very small gyms set adjacent to each other. Most of the floorboards are either dead or shoddily fixed, the backboards ring, the entire building has that strange stench of an unrenovated building that struggles to keep up with bills. It’s tough to believe that several NBA players and a ton of college stars spent their coming-of-age years in this very Y. Basketball is free from the need for expensive equipment or amenities-- in this way the game presents itself as an empty slate and demands a powerful aesthetic. I didn't have the vocabulary to realize it back then but as a quiet kid I’ve always loved how mastering the moves of the game is sorta like excelling at carpentering or cooking, a concrete means for even the most soft-spoken among us (see: Derrick Rose, Paul Pierce) to obtain wordless authority. “Ball don’t lie” as all-time NBA technical foul leader Rasheed Wallace used to say in his playing days.

My dad gave me a Wisconsin Badgers basketball at the age of 4 and I went to town. In the lonesome Sunday morning confines of that same YMCA gym I constructed a kingdom where I could feel powerful. My shooting technique, ball handling, playing motions, my pieces of clothing, sneakers, ball, my copy of “Hoop Dreams”-- all of it was sacred. It was me, the identity I had constructed for myself through physical and mental struggle. I played competitively until genetic limitations became all too apparent to college recruits, but by then I had other things going for me so it wasn’t too devastating.

People forget that this stuff isn't logical. Once you fall in love with an objective, dynamic thing you can never take it back; there always exists the potential for renewal, unlike a past love. Once your old girl is whoring it up or in Facebook pictures with her 4 "inherited" kids and trashy fiancee-- it's definitely over at that point. But like reading a pleasurable hyper-realistic sentence in a novel, you can always feel reborn after picking up a ball or watching Dirk Nowitzski ice the Finals.

There's a lot of hate for the NBA right now-- the "millionaires vs. billionaires" line of players vs. owners, the fact that entertainment is being sacrificed for confusing legal bullshit. There’s even a twitter “movement” called #unfollowNBA in which people are unfollowing those entrenched (players AND owners) in the labor proceedings. Sure, as someone that watches the games religiously, the lockout upsets me too. Those of us not business/law-savvy have certainly learned a thing or two about collective bargaining and negotiations this fall. The overarching fact is that even the high earners that constitute this labor dispute can’t be excluded from the tremendous thunder that we are seeing all over the world lately: an uncompromising desire to define oneself, especially if it means withdrawing from the structured order and saying to power “Well, what are you gonna do now? I refuse to participate. Your move big man”.

The lockout went down like this: in the past couple of years players have been making salaries deemed too big by the owners for the amount of lost revenue.. You’d think this would be classified as a Bad Business Decision, but not so fast! The owners are demanding a bailout, much like the banks and car companies, via negotiating lower player salaries and profit sharing. By autumn the proposed “deal” to the players included threatening the player’s association to act fast fast fast or else it would progressively receive worse and worse offers as they started to cancel regular season games. In short, it was clear who was in charge. Months of boring aspirational sports articles entitled things like “How the NBA Can Start Again by Christmas” appeared on all the dumb sports websites. Talks broke down last week and the players have thus disbanded their union and are putting the case into the hands of the US courts, filing an antitrust suit against the NBA-- a drastic and ballsy move by any account. Needless to say, we may have lost the entire season by the time the constipated courts shit out a ruling.

So it’s clear that the players are intent on giving up the season. Unlike joe schmoe employees that were laid off by GM, NBA players have something unique: scarcity. They command movie star status in US culture; a typical barroom argument I continue to make is this: pit the top 20 NBA players against players from other ‘merican sport in terms of name recognition and the NBA wins handily. The NFL can live without Aaron Rodgers but the NBA would be devastated to lose Lebron or Kobe. I’ve long dreamed of a professional basketball league that is 100% player owned; I really think it could be done if enough crafty and subversive people were involved. Until then it’s just another day, another bunch of guys getting paper while playing the sport that they love, and, at the moment, one of the few US examples of resistance to the ugly demands of an incompetent bunch of CEOs.



But that’s not really the entire situation, is it? If you’ve followed the NBA the past few years, you might have made an interesting connection. With the Portland “Jailblazers” of the late 90s, the infamous Malice in the Palace in 2004, Allen Iverson (#1 most wanted “thug” by white media), and Gilbert Arenas bringing the heat to the Wizard locker room over some wagers-gone-bad, NBA commissioner David Stern has made repeated decisions to oppress what he saw as a destructive culture that damaged the sport. He banned headphones, chains, and loose fitting clothing at NBA sponsored events. He cracked down repeatedly on “thug culture”, doling disproportionate fines to players that didn’t fall into line. Of course it’s not about sterilizing the culture of the predominately African-American athletes, or the culture of basketball. It’s not “personal”. It’s simply business, a measured re-adjustment to the fact that the US is 70% white. But to me, as someone who’s attachment to the game runs deep, this turn isn’t anything other than aesthetic repression, a phenomenon that doesn’t exactly have the best track record throughout history. And, in this light, the breakdown of talks is courageous resistance that we all should’ve seen coming. You can’t decouple the game from its style.

In the middle of a condescending speech by Stern during the labor talks, the usually chill Miami Heat guard Dwyane Wade reportedly exploded and shouted "Don't you point your finger at me!"...the signifying connotation here is both obvious and still powerful in 2011-- any true NBA fan would concede the season and support such resistance.

Edited by animedad ()

#2
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The proletarians should stand with the NBA players.
#3
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animedad posted:
any true NBA fan would concede the season and support such resistance.


yeah that's me. still won't be watching college ball though yuck

#4
el area metro
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Last season I just watched the local league and it was way better than NBA bullshit. Vaqueros 4eva
#5
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refs make the nba really difficult to watch a lot of times, but i still prefer that over the ncaa
#6
el area metro
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Well yeah I wasn't talking about NBA vs NCAA and I wasn't talking about refs either, but thanks for your opinion about officialdom in professional baskitbawl
#7
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maybe i was responding to my own post

(in this post, i am responding to you)
#8
drivel of drunken hags
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vampirarchist posted:
The proletarians should stand with the NBA players.


agreed but only because I don't care about this sport. when the NFL players were locked out I really didn't care what kind of terrible deal they accepted because deep down I knew that watching pro football was more important to me than the erosion of labor rights

#9
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really great thread, thanks OP.

do you have an opinion on the state of college basketball, where the players are essentially working for free while the universities rake in billions of dollars?
#10
lies half the time
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germanjoey posted:
do you have an opinion on the state of college basketball, where the players are essentially working for free while the universities rake in billions of dollars?



Yes, ban sanctioned college sports.

#11
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sorry, i wrote my article then scuttled off to thanksgiving stuff. i'll post post post in a bit
#12
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http://www.negativedunkalectics.com/2011/10/we-all-deserve-more.html

Ownership of anything, no matter the small number or interest of those humans in their products, should never be able to fillet their workers into bailing them out for making bad personnel and unrelated business decisions. When many owners, as others have argued, own teams specifically as an aesthetic fetish, there is something even more perverse than the lack of respect they have garnered. For their work (as they are the product), the players deserve more than the nonsensical lockout which has occurred.


the idea of professional sports team as bourgeois aesthetic project is so fascinating !

#13
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http://www.negativedunkalectics.com/2011/03/nba-will-expose-you-tom-scharpling-and.html

I ask Tom if this meant he was just a fan of basketball, or just a fan of the NBA. Did he follow college hoops at all? He didn’t. “Maybe its because I went to a community college and never had that connection to a university or team or whatever.”

He asks me where I went to college. “The University of Texas,” I reply.

“Okay, so you probably like that team, right?”

“Actually I hate college basketball,” I respond. “But its interesting because a bunch of us that write on the blog have been debating this issue since the NCAA tournament started. And even among those of us who don’t like college ball, not everybody agrees on why.”

“Look, I’ll stop short of saying there is a racist element to the NCAA,” he begins, “but its tricky. Any sport that is structured so that shitty players (who are considered to be ‘all heart’) can shut down better players (who are just ‘all talent’), there’s a racial element.

“There is a certain amount of wish fulfillment when people call the NCAA ‘pure basketball.’ I think its as impure as it gets. You want a shitty white dude to hold his own? The more talented athelete is paying the price, smothered by the system.

“The standards in the NCAA and the NBA are different. In college the coach is the constant. The fan is bigger than the player in a weird way!

“In the NBA, the best is the best; heart isn’t enough. Starks had heart but he could play, too. He knew the game. Iverson was heart, but he also was a wizard with the basketball. The NBA will expose you. NCAA fans want to believe they are better than the players, that’s why they prefer college ball. ‘They are playing for the right reasons, for the love of the game.’ That’s horseshit. Where are these people when college baseball starts up? They don’t have any problem with the MLB. They probably think the MLB is plenty ‘pure.’ But that’s just because there are plenty of white players.

“Is it a coincidence that Obama is an NBA fan? Maybe the first president who is a fan of an NBA franchise rather than of his alma mater team? Harvard or whatever?”

#14
el area metro
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The BSN league is far superior to the NBA in every way. I urge you all to watch it.
#15
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Damn. The lockout is over.
#16
Dont Mess With Sucess
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DAMN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
#17
Kurdt
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dang
#18
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NBA DAM!!
#19
[account deactivated]
#20
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haha thanks for caving and ruining all those words i wrote fellas
#21
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blinkandwheeze posted:
http://www.negativedunkalectics.com/2011/03/nba-will-expose-you-tom-scharpling-and.html


sweet blog. i tend to agree with the political undercurrent to fandom. id also say that i dont like college bball because it's one of the worst examples of the (necessary) coercion involved in removing $$$ from the game. like in the nba the money is all out there, it's based more on merit *because* of the dolla bills (kinda a weird and contradictory thought!). the usual narrative is that college just needs to root out the bad seeds, and they like to report on the scandals but cover the games as if nothing happened.

as far as my article is concerned, you could talk about the evils of capitalism in the NBA all you want and it would technically be correct. that's pretty boring to me though, and why i avoided it in the OP. i really like those articles where the author inserts him/herself into the story as its entire reason for being. there's no "rational" reason for anyone to participate in this "struggle" unless he/she already cares a lot, and those lil labors of love are some of my favorite pieces of writing. but enough with the metacommentary!