You need to watch LeBron James play basketball tonight.
What can I say that would be remotely original? What words in the lexicon of greatness can be heaped upon the guy that have not already been heaped a thousand times over? I’m not sure that there is anything left to say that hasn’t been written already by scores of writers. Worse, most of it was written long before he did anything remotely worthy of such praise, which makes all those superlatives that he now actually deserves seem somehow tainted.
Maybe, then, all I really need to say is simply this: You need to watch LeBron James play basketball tonight.
If you don’t follow basketball, all you really need to know is this: Last summer in the off season, the Cleveland Cavaliers loaded up their team with major talent in the hopes of winning a championship. In addition to Kyrie Irving and Anderson Varejao, respectively a superstar and a strong veteran already on the team, they signed LeBron James and traded to get another fully developed superstar, Kevin Love. Then they surrounded this quartet with a couple of handy and serviceable role players, and — frankly — a bunch of warm bodies. Over the course of the year, however, Irving, Varejao, and Love — three of the teams five starters — have fallen to injury. The four people who now start with LeBron James aren’t just people who wouldn’t have started for any other NBA playoff team — it’s not entirely certain they all would have made any playoff teams’ rosters at all.
By all rights, the Cleveland Cavaliers’ season should be done by now. And yet here they are, playing in the Finals against the team with the best record and the league’s current MVP. And they’re not just playing in the finals, they’re actually competing in it. And not just competing, but actually winning. They lead 2-1 in the seven game series, and the reason they are comes down to one man: LeBron James.
Basketball is a five man game, so it would be a mistake to say James is doing it single handedly — but it’s about as close to ‘single handedly’ as I’ve seen in a Finals series. And don’t get me wrong, everyone playing with James is working their asses off. But those players playing their asses off should still equate to being run out of the building by the Golden State Warriors just phoning it in. Every now and then in the series, someone whose name is not LeBron James will run the offense or bring the ball up court for Cleveland, and far more often than not this will lead to them turning the ball over or taking a terrible — terrible — shot. This is because every player at every position on Golden State is a gazillion times better than anyone on the Cavs — except for James, who somehow makes up for all of it.
If you know anything about basketball, you know that at this level of competition that just can’t happen. Kobe could not have done this. Neither could Magic, or Bird, or Timmy, or the Admiril, or the Dream, or the Doctor. I don’t even believe (sacrilege!) Michael could have done this. Because it’s impossible.
And yet, somehow, right here and right now, it isn’t.
Listen: I have been watching basketball all of my life, and I have seen a thing or two. I’ve sat breathless in stadiums, arenas, bars, and living rooms, and I’ve witnessed Jerry West, Michael Carter WIlliams, and everyone in between. I witnessed Bird steal the ball, Magic step in at center, and the Doctor take it baseline. I saw Reggie destroy one franchise’s title hopes for at least a generation in nine seconds, and Big Shot Rob destroy another’s in just one. I watched all of the hushed Toronto faithful silently count to 81. I sat riveted as I waited for the flu to do to a human body what the flu is supposed to do to a human body but somehow didn’t. I’m telling you, I’ve seen a lot.
But I’ve never seen anything like this, ever.
The Cavaliers may not win the series. Indeed, I still think the smart money is that they won’t. Still, watching LeBron James in this series is something you will remember for the rest of your life because stuff like this only happens once in a generation, if ever.
It doesn’t matter if you aren’t that into basketball, or if you are but you don’t really follow either team. It doesn’t even matter if you rightfully think James gets too much media attention already, or if (like me) you just hate the guy. If that’s the case, then a week from now you can totally go right back to hating him.
But for right now, for just tonight, none of that matters.
Just watch the game, and be amazed.
I think the 80s finals comes close, but it wasn’t a whole series. If LeBron wins this, it will be the greatest individual performance in history, hands down.Report
This has been my favorite finals so far. Curry has been off, for sure, but he’s still making plays that human beings should not be able to make: the shot off the triple screen near the end of the 4th in game 3, e.g., or the game 1 breaking of LeBron’s ankles, which never happens.
Also, I think that if the smart money is still on GS, it’s by a very, very slim margin, as Green is really hurt, and Barnes has been completely shut down. Right now, GS is just a backcourt and maybe David Lee (who didn’t even play in games 1 and 2), and while making those 3’s will keep them in games, it will be damn hard for them to win with 3 point shots alone.Report
As far as series goes, to this point it is the best of my adult lifetime (I’m 31). However, Game 6 of the first Spurs/Heat series was probably the best game… or at least most insane finish in that time frame. I believe I hosted a life blog here that just devolved into me smashing my fist into the keyboard.Report
*Nods and chuckles knowingly.*
I’ll be back later.Report
Nods. It seems impossible to imagine that he won’t win the Finals MVP award regardless of the series’s outcome.Report
LeBron James is breaking basketball. What he’s doing doesn’t make sense. And one of the frustrating things about it is that it isn’t all that easy to see if you don’t really follow the game. So, yes, watch LeBron tonight and every night… but you still might miss his greatness unfold because of just how unique it is.Report
If only he weren’t whining so much (and being whined for by proxy by the ABC crew), I might appreciate hm more.Report
What do you mean?Report
LeBron: http://espn.go.com/nba/playoffs/2015/story/_/id/13045470/lebron-james-cleveland-cavaliers-observes-nba-finals-schedule-gives-golden-state-warriors-extra-days-home
And the ABC crew saying in so many words that LeBron should get “the benefit of the doubt” on foul calls.Report
The NBA has had 3 types of rules, at least since the days of Jordan: rules for most players during most of the game, rules for most players in the final seconds, and rules for superstars.Report
This year’s MVP is apparently not a superstar. He can be gang-tackled without getting a call.Report
So, you’re just ignoring the fact that the NBA admitted they screwed up multiple times in the besainted Warrior’s favor?
http://espn.go.com/nba/playoffs/2015/story/_/id/13042750/2015-nba-finals-league-admits-missed-calls-end-game-2
The refs are going to screw up for every team, every time. That’s just how it works when you have professional athletes in close contact with each other.Report
You mean they didn’t call the foul after they didn’t call traveling? That sounds pretty even to me.Report
Traveling hasn’t been called in the NBA since 1978.Report
The NBA doesn’t call that kind of foul on much of anyone in most games (sometimes they’ll go crazy and start calling them, and everyone on both teams freaks the hell out). The other foul they don’t call much is the moving screen, which is why the Warriors were the best team in the league this year.
You see LeBron’s superstar advantage most clearly when he clears out with his left arm, which he does every single time he posts up. Given how big and physically strong he is, it makes it impossible to defend his post up moves, and you just have to hope that he misses. Just about anyone else would get called for an offensive foul for that.Report
To the casual observer, it might even look like a bad performance. Sure, he’s scoring a lot, but his shooting has been terrible for the last two series, so he’s taking a ton of shots to get all those points.
This completely misses what he’s doing offensively, but if you didn’t know much about basketball, it’d probably be what jumps out at you. And then what he’s doing defensively, particularly when he has to switch on Curry 1-on-1 after one of the bazillion screens GS sets, as he frequently does…Report
@chris
Or people might think, “Wow, 40 points!” because that is easy to see. When the 40+ points might be the least impressive part of what he is doing.Report
Aye – it’s the 12-18 rebounds and 8-12 assists per night, not to mention the steals and blocked shots and generally making life miserable for GS on defense.
Having lost one of the NBA’s best point guards and one of its best rebounders, Lebron has taken it upon himself to simultaneously play the role of All-Star point guard, power forward, and shooting guard/small forward.Report
One of the TV guys called him a point forward the other night. Which is about right.
The thing that amazed me is that he’s not only scoring, of course. He’s playing great defense (individual as well as team defense!), rebounding, getting all the switches right, as well as getting everyone else involved on offense even while he brings the ball up and sets the offense 90% of the time. Like Tod said, if you haven’t seen it you wouldn’t believe what he’s actually doing.
(I think he’s gonna get back court pressure tonight, tho. No more strolling into the front court.)Report
All I got to say is that sometimes I feel very odd being one of the few guys who seemed born without the liking sports gene. I get the importance of physical activity and nutrition for health reasons. I get why it can be fun to play sports with friends (somewhat, I always hated gym). I don’t get the idea of watching professional sports. There was a cartoon that was going around earlier this year. The cartoon featured a sports journalist talking to a football team guy. The football team guy was saying stuff like “We sports hard. But the other team sportsed harder and won. We need to work on our sportsing next time.”
This is what sports pretty much are for me.
I sincerely wonder what causes a lot of people to be really into sports and other people to just look at sports with a blank wall incomprehension. I even liked that I went to a Division III school where sports are not a big deal.
And I suspect that I will get a lot of heat for this.Report
Just watch everyone sitting around screaming about whether Israel or Palestine is more just, all the while people — innocent people — are dying.
Teams! Teams! Teams!
Unity is Life!Report
The “winner by proxy” mental behavior is indeed powerful and, thanks to the internet, infects just about everything we do whether it is video games, comic book movies, or political parties. I think I miss the days before the internet when this behavior was mostly constrained to which team of multi-millionaires I was supposed to cheer on at a sporting event.Report
The problem with society today is that there are people who think we shouldn’t watch sports.Report
It’s a silly pastime, but there’s tons of those, and is it really any sillier than going to bars and having people throw glass bottles (or tomatoes) at you? No, actually, it’s far less silly.Report
Kim, one of these days I really need to go out drinking with you.Report
LOL. They only have bars where they throw glass bottles south of the Mason Dixon… (Mostly near army bases). And I’ve never been.
I could carry along a bit of dehydrated wine next time I’m out though. If you managed to swing by the Dolly Sods, I might not even have to admit I knew ya… 😉Report
Where did I say that?
I just feel like an outsider when everyone seems to talk about sports especially during Finals time. Especially with titles like “You need to watch lebron james play baketball tonight” and no one gets angry at it in the same ways as they would if I worte “You need to read Narcissus and Goldman” or “You need to watch the 400 Blows” because those suggestions are obviously snobby.
I would say that there is more sports mandatoriness in the world than anything else.Report
If you aren’t watching Orphan Black, you totally need to be. It’s a triumph of acting akin to Lebron James playing basketball.
Insert other references as you please — I totally want to hear them, and will totally check them out (as soon as I find the time. I only JUST saw Tootsie, and that’s one of the top ten screenplays EVER).Report
The form, not the content, was my comment.Report
@saul-degraw
“And I suspect that I will get a lot of heat for this.”
Why? Honestly, I couldn’t care less if you do or don’t like sports. To each his own. I may give you pushback if you start saying I shouldn’t watch sports but I don’t get that sense from you here.Report
@saul-degraw “I don’t get the idea of watching professional sports.”
Part of it is certainly the competition, obviously; part is tradition; part is that for many it sparks memories of youth.
But I think if I wanted to offer you an explanation I think might speak to you…
I would submit that the reason one watches professional sports is akin to the reason one goes to hear Kathleen Battle at the Met, or that one goes to see a Romare Bearden showing, or goes to see a recital by Mitsuko Uchida, despite the fact that anyone can sing, paint, or take piano lessons on their own, and enjoy doing it.
One goes and witnesses those things because there’s something profound about seeing gifted, dedicated people achieve a level of performance that escapes the realms of possibility for most humans.
It’s the same with professional sports.Report
What troubles me about professional sports is what troubles me about ballet. The idea that we’re pushing people past the point of injuring themselves…Report
And there’s beer and garlic fries.Report
I know a place that serves fries done in lard….Report
I can get beer at Shotgun Players in Berkeley and take it to my seatReport
This is fair. Lebron James is obviously talented in ways most people including other great professional athletes are. I don’t deny that athletes have talent.
I am just trying to still figure out (and perhaps care too much about) why some things are considered snobby and not others. Sports obviously speaks to billions of people worldwide. Football (Soccer) has the world mad in ways that even dwarf American sports fandom. Hence the story about how Germany might (or probably did) have done a back-room Arms Deal with Saudi Arabia to get a World Cup vote.
I just look at all the money spent on sports and it seems mad to me at some level. Obviously other people feel the same way about the cost of Opera tickets. The Mets and the Yankees don’t make me miss New York. This makes me miss New York:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/arts/music/joan-of-arc-at-the-stake-distilled-to-her-essence-at-the-new-york-philharmonic.html
So yeah I am arts mad and I get that this can be snobby and maybe it is just a numbers thing.Report
Oh, Saul, Nobody’s Snobby about arts. They’re snobby about Particular Arts, like they’re snobby about Particular Sports.
Try finding 10 fencing afficianados — nope, too snobby. Ditto Lacrosse and Field Hockey. Even Soccer is too snobby for most Americans.
Every single person watches television, or reads, or listens to music. They’re fine pastimes, and most people don’t think you’re snobby for doing ’em. Now, if you go to curated artsy things (or watch Harold and Maude)… then maybe you’re snobby.
Snobby is a combination of “This is Upper Class” and “I don’t like it.”Report
“Even Soccer is too snobby for most Americans.”
I like cricket. It is a great game in its own right, and coming to it from baseball there are weirdly inverted imperatives that I find fascinating. In America, soccer is positively mainstream compared with cricket, and has been for all my life. I have offered to take friends to a cricket match. I have not once had anyone take me up on this, even with assurances that no, it won’t take five days, and that no, the game is not inscrutable (at least in its basics). The response is much the same as if I had suggested we stroll naked down Main Street.Report
Can you give me the basics to cricket? (Yes, I could use wiki. I think you’d be faster and more succinct)Report
I’ve been thinking about this as the subject for a post. I’ll put in on the list.Report
This is one of my favorite things, from Malcolm Muggeride’s autobiography:
(It’s not.)Report
Mike,
it depends on the author. And sometimes you get one of those “this is personal” stories where it’s just not working, but the author says it has to be that way anyhow — and those suck.Report
The funny thing about cricket is that, while we think of it as quintessentially British, it’s a niche sport in the UK, far less popular than soccer. Cricket’s mass popularity is in South Asia.Report
I think it was more popular but fell out of favor during the post-war period and got seen as being too snobby and “public school”
There is a book called “When Basketball was Jewish”. A lot of the early professional players were Jewish guys from NYC, Philadelphia, Newark, Chicago, and Detroit. They played basketball because it was cheap and did not require much equipment. This is why basketball is the urban game.
Soccer functions this way for most of the world.Report
The observation about soccer being far more popular comes from from Orwell, so it’s not new.
I presume you’ve seem the quote from Paul Gallico [1], written in the 30s, that basketball “appeals to the Hebrew with his Oriental background [because] the game places a premium on an alert, scheming mind and flashy trickiness, artful dodging and general smartalecness.”
1. Remembered today, if at all, for his novel The Poseidon Adventure.Report
Never saw that before.
Orwell famously was appalled by a football mob which caused one Cockney fan to observe that Orwell and other intellectuals “missed out on all the fun in life.”Report
Ashis Nandy says, “Cricket is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the British”.Report
I think that down here in the south SF Bay area is one of the few places in the US where you can go for a walk around your neighborhood and see more than one field with people playing or practicing cricket.Report
There used to be some games around NYC among South Asian expats and immigrants.Report
I once saw a listing of cricket clubs in the United States. This was some years back, but at that time the capitol of American cricket was Redmond, Washington.Report
Snobby is a combination of “This is Upper Class” and “I don’t like it.”
This is an astute observation.Report
Americans don’t think soccer is snobby, it’s just that many American see it as a kid’s sport but this is changing. My opinion is that Americans aren’t into soccer because of an accident of history. One reason why soccer became the big sport was because it is cheap to play. This allowed it to grow in many poor countries and colonies. When professional sports became a big think, the United Ststes was wealthier than most other countries. We could afford more expensive sports.Report
Why Americans play (American) football and why most of the rest of the world plays Association football is a source of great fascination to me. I will probably write about it at some point. The short form is that we play American football because we always have, for a value of “always” going back to the 1870s and for a value of “American football” that initially was “Rugby.” The initial trend was toward soccer, but Harvard preferred Rugby, and Harvard is Harvard and always has been, and Harvard is and was excruciatingly aware of this, and that everyone else is not Harvard, so if Harvard preferred Rugby, they weren’t going to let everyone else get in the way. Seriously. If you are an American football fan, thank Harvard.
As for the rest of the world, it is complicated. There are places where other forms of football, or even other sports entirely, are bigger than soccer. It ties in with British Imperial history. You can divided this into three phases. Roughly, the first is the North American and Caribbean colonies. The second is India and Australia and the like. The third is Africa, along with a lot of economic imperialism that doesn’t appear pink on the map. The soccer world \\is the third phase empire western and central Europe, which was deeply impressed by the success of the British Empire.
As for Americans and soccer snobbery, consider hipsters talking about “footie” while wearing their Chelsea shirts. Also MLS team names like “DC United” or “Real Salt Lake City” are absurdly twee, and deserve to be roundly mocked.Report
Those are the hipsters who largely grew up playing soccer instead of Little League Baseball and Football. Soccer was huge for kids at my upper-middle class Northeast suburb, little league football, not as much.
I know that in the late 19th and early 20th century sports fandom for boys was largely centered on Harvard and Yale.Report
What @tod-kelly says. One reason I struggle to watch most college athletics is because we are seeing something less than the best quality of play. I’m more likely to watch Olympic swimming than a random college basketball game — even though I love basketball and am meh about swimming — because there is something about greatness. And competition. And it is why I can get suckered into performing art shows that I can understand. Drama is hard for me to make sense of because I don’t get it. And I don’t know the technical aspects of singing or dancing, but I can at least say, “Holy shit, that was awesome!”
Sports gives lots of, “Holy shit, that was awesome!” And even more so when you truly understand them.Report
FWIW, I have tickets to see a play at the Folger Theater in about a week and a half. I plan on spending the day in the Library of Congress researching baseball, then wandering over to the Folger.Report
@richard-hershberger
I know plenty of people who are arts-mad and sports-mad. I am just not one of them.
I kind of sort of have a fondness for the Mets but that is mainly because they are underdogs. If you gave me the option between going to a performance at Mostly Mozart or Lincoln Center’s Summer Festival and going to a Mets game with prime seating. I will pick the arts every time.Report
I would probably take the baseball tickets, but I would check to music programs first. My problem is that I am too snobby for a lot of classical music performances. Symphony programing based on the belief that music began with Beethoven and ended with Tchaikovsky bore me. The thing with sports is that you don’t know what is going to happen. It might be a great game you will talk about for years, or it might be complete snooze. But a lot of arts programming is pretty much guaranteed to be the latter.Report
SF is pretty good with doing more modern stuff but there is a lot of old favorites programming as well or video-game night to get the kids in and get a quick revenue boost.
I’d go for other Russians like Shostakovich. I adore Shostakovich.Report
I go for some modern stuff, but it is the baroque period that really gets my juices flowing.Report
I am not hugely fond of the Baroque. I usually start at Mozart. I adore Mozart.Report
I’m with Richard. When I was writing the classical music posts, I had to really work at not making them all Baroque.Report
What gets me about a lot of sports especially the big three is the damn spectacle of it all. It is too much like too many Hollywood movies which just try to out CGI each other.
Now minimalism is not perfect. There are plenty of people who will make a play take place in the same room because it is cheaper and this is not good but man is it much better to capture attention when you can do it with actors, story, and writing over fancy spectacle.Report
Oscar nominee from Israel was pretty much one room last year. Impressive, that.Report
You should check out Love Solfege when you get a chance.
Some of that music is literally impossible to play (someone broke a violin while trying, though…)Report
@saul-degraw
I don’t know about snobbiness — that is a word I so very rarely use — but I think sports appeals to the masses in part because there is something both tribal and collective about it. I have a team. Tod has a team. We align ourselves with them and their followers in a way that you probably don’t with actors. I doubt you turn to your seatmates during a show and high five after a line is delivered perfectly.
So while there are similarities to sports and the performing arts, there are also differences that make them appeal differently to folks. Many people root for sports teams not so much because they know or care about the game itself, but because it brings them in line with something larger. I root for the Red Sox because my dad did and did so before I even knew what the hell was happening on the field. But it connected me with him. I’m not sure the performing arts offer this same opportunity. Which isn’t a knock on them… it just means it has some limits to the type of audience it can draw. A seven-year-old isn’t going to watch MacBeth because mommy loves it. Well, most seven-year-olds, at least.Report
And I suspect that I will get a lot of heat for this.
Last year, maybe. This year you’ll get accused of being cavalier.Report
Bless your dear heart.Report
That was very well played.Report
Oh my.Report
Slow clap.Report
@saul-degraw
I thought I was the only one without the sports gene!
Its a running joke with my wife that if I am in a group of guy who start a conversation involving sports (like, say, “you gotta watch LeBron James” my defense mechanism is to chuckle knowingly and nod my head.
Then discover an urgent need to be somewhere else, lest my mancard be revoked summarily.Report
My husband just refuses to talk to people like that.
Or he’ll spin it into an entirely different conversation, if the poor lads can keep up.Report
What does he talk about? I ask because there are lots of non-sports topics that I am more than happy to talk about, and I will actively seek out other persons who are interested. But I don’t imagine that I am so scintillating that I will fascinate random passersby. I consciously restrain myself from the temptation to become an utter bore.Report
Depends on the person, I suppose. Statistics and strategy are generally good topics for baseball fans, though — certainly worked with Poblano.Report
@lwa
We exist but in seemingly small numbers. Most of my women friends are also much, much more into sports than I am. Glyph once mentioned that he did not have the sports-caring gene either.Report
I only follow sports because of where I live.
And I am the Worst Fan Ever because I never watch a game.Report
I’ve never learned how to care, or even pretend that I care. I wish I could. It is very easy, as a man, to feel left out when you don’t.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand the social aspect; and if you invite me to go to a game with you, I will totally go, and have a good time drinking beer in the sun and looking at the sights; but I generally don’t find pro sports even a little bit emotionally-involving.
I can muster up *some* enthusiasm and interest and “rah!” for amateur or high-school/college stuff, where the “my tribe” aspect isn’t quite so abstracted-out, and the games are not so massively, nakedly profit and -spectacle-driven.
(Holy crap – I just realized that even when it comes to sports, I’m still a 90’s underdog indie-rock Gen-X guy. “That dude totally sold out when he went to the majors, man. Just a buncha corporate BS now.”)Report
If you must go to one game, go to a home game by the Pittsburgh Pirates, one that’s around sunset. Great view of the city as it lights up at night (including a great multicolored pyramid that tells the weather).Report
It is, by all accounts, the second most beautiful ballpark in the world.Report
First being Comerica Park.Report
Comerica is indeed a really nice park.Report
I mourn the days when Detroit teams played in Tigers’ Stadium, the (Pontiac) Silverdome, the Palace (at Auburn Hills) and the Joe Louis Arena. Not because those were necessarily great venues, but because none of them were named after any g-d corporations. (I know Comerica has a long Detroit history, but they’re not even based there anymore.) But yeah, Comerica park is nice and at least it and Ford Field* are actually in Detroit. I also know that in feeling this way, I’m in “old man shakes fist at clouds” territory…
* I am actually ok with Ford Field, because (a) Ford is more than a corporation, it’s a Detroit family where (b) Both the family and the corporation played a huge part in making 20th century Detroit what it was, not to mention (c) a Ford actually owns the team. That said, if the Wings go from The Joe to playing at Little Caesar’s arena, I will die a little inside.Report
It genuinely sucks that y’all feel left out.Report
Eh, it is what it is and I have made my peace with it, knowing that when I start babbling about *my* enthusiasms, plenty of people out there are puzzled as to what I could possibly see of any interest in that.
Sports fandom is just a pretty widespread phenomenon; and I think especially for guys, there are times when you feel like a real weirdo being the only one who doesn’t have an opinion on [sports topic X], or even understand why one would.
I remember being pretty young when I first realized the guys on “our” NFL team didn’t really come from our area, and the team owners mightn’t hail from here either; right then and there, the whole concept of pro sports just struck me as so strange and alien and baffling, that you were supposed to root for “your” “team”. What do *they* have to do with *me*? I fail to see any connection! This is large-scale emotional manipulation!
(I had a prodigious vocabulary, which in no way protected me from wedgies).Report
You guys have Chomsky on your side, at least:
Report
A perfect example of something so dumb only an intellectual would come up with it.
And the part that does make sense is something a genuinely smart person could say in one tenth the space.
“So. basically, you’re rooting for laundry” — Jerry SeinfeldReport
Mike, he was speaking extemporaneously, so a lot is going to be pensive filler (especially with Chomsky, who doesn’t pause or have a lot of disfluency).
Mike and LWA, though I used a Chomsky quote, the notion that sports is a form of pacifying the masses or serves a propagandistic function goes back at least to the Greeks.
Also, as someone who sees what Glyph said and immediately thought of Manufacturing Consent, I obviously don’t think Chomsky amounts to Godwining. (Pssshh… liberals.)
Glyph, I thought it might.Report
Advertisers pay for sports because they’re part of the conspiracy to indoctrinate the masses into mindless jingoism, uh-huh. The fact that they sell a ton of beer that way is just gravy.Report
Beer is the opiate of the masses.Report
I miss the days when opium was the opium of the masses.Report
@chris
So you are the basis of Christopher Lee’s performances in Dracula!Report
He’s not saying that’s sports only function, or even that it’s a conspiracy or a deliberative act. He’s saying that it comes to serve that purpose, among others. It would be perfectly consistent with what he’s saying to suggest that sports also serve nakedly capitalist functions.Report
That’s an interesting quote, and I identify with it quite a bit.
I *did* enjoy HS football, because I went to a small school, and did know those guys; but after that, it just became way too abstract, and I am much more likely to look at sports-related phenomena in an amateur sociological/anthropological way, like “what would I *think* was happening here, if I were an alien observer” (which I really do feel like – there’s a real…distance, for lack of a better word, emotionally and intellectually) – so all of that tribalism and ritualistic-warfare stuff really stands out.
But all that said, it can be joyous to feel part of something larger than oneself, and I am a little sad that I am denied that pleasure, whether by temperament or by choice.
It’s kind of like religion with my grandma – I couldn’t ever feel what she felt, but I wished I could.Report
The libertarian is the one who likes the Chomsky quote!!!
I never thought I would see the day.Report
Dude, if you think it’s weird that a libertarian likes Chomsky, you really should read some Chomsky.Report
Oy-
Being compared to Chomsky must violate some sort of rule about civility, or Godwin or something.
I wouldn’t for a moment assert that my preferences (politics, art, history) are somehow superior to sports.
They trigger the same tribal impulses, same irrational thought processes.Report
Yeah. I agree. That quote is silly. I bet he even said it in Cambridge or Berkeley.Report
@chris
It is partially feeling left out but a lot of guys wrap up their guyness in their sports fandom. So when you say that you are not a sports guy, it is like getting a look like you are from an alien planet.
Women can even do this to guys.
So there are all sorts of gendered assumptions and stuff that still plague heterosexual guys where it assumed that some part of you is going to like sports.
Heterosexual guys are probably the most narrow enforcers of what it means to be masculine.Report
I wouldn’t look at you funny, if you said that you didn’t like sports in a real life conversation. I would, though, if you started saying things like:
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I accept the idea that sports–at least team sports–are a substitute for aggression. How many wars are begun after careful cost-benefit analyses? Some, but not many. How many wars are begun as masculine dominance exercises? Many. So if we can get the masculine dominance exercises out of our systems via our sports teams, that is a complete win. It might even justify public funding of stadia.
There was a lot of discussion in the early years of baseball of what the public would or should care about. The early clubs were social organizations. Playing for the honor of the club was something everyone understood, but it was less clear why anyone not in the club should care. Betting was the obvious reason. To a certain sort of bettor, the game itself is unimportant. It could be a baseball game or it could be a cockroach race. The bet was the thing.
Then a bit later there arose the idea of a “representative club” for any given city or town. The early thinking was that the citizens would only care if the players were actually from that city. Players from other cities, it was thought, would be regarded simply as hired mercenaries. It turns out that they cared a great deal about winning, and little about the origins of the players doing it. This is the Seinfeld observation that we are rooting for laundry. The phenomenon goes back to the 1870s, and so does the bemusement of observers.
Even if you don’t personally feel any need to vicariously satisfy your aggressive tendencies, sports can give you something to talk about. This might seem trivial, but it provides a human connection that can cross class and race lines. I can find myself in a country club or at a bus stop, and how the local team is doing can be a topic of conversation. Small talk serves an important social function, and can help humanize one another, so this is not nothing.Report
@richard-hershberger
I do think that sports do work for a mini-version of hometown pride and rivalry yes. I know a guy from Ohio who moved to the Bay Area and he is rooting for the Cavaliers because they are the hometown team still.Report
Hey, it could be worse. You could have, at best, a vestigial sports gene, such that you have learned over many years to more or less like sports in very specific circumstances, and then you might only be interested in the finals because of the super-exciting career of this guy you went to college with who is now the NBA’s regular season MVP, only to see them be that guy lead the team that is being single-handedly beaten by Lebron.Report
You know Curry from college? I am envious as hell.Report
@mike-schilling Not quite. We both went to Davidson and I was a year ahead of him, so I was a student during the crazy 2008 NCAA run. As far as personal connections go, let’s see. My girlfriend at the time lived in an apartment a floor above him and a couple other basketball players, so I knew about it when they left food outside in order to attract a raccoon in order to make it their pet. I was in a Poli Sci class with Andrew Lovedale, one of his teammates from the 2008 run in which Lovedale and I were on a team when we played Diplomacy as an in-class project. Austin Bell, the guy behind this madness, was part of my regular bridge group. Oh, and Curry passed me on a path at night once and we said “hey” to each other. I also went to High School with Chris Paul, but that’s way less cool.Report
I do not entirely get sports myself. I have tried to follow them occasionally, but it just never clicked. My father did not watch pro sports much, so I think that might be a factor.
He did watch pro wrestling and Nascar, and I did end up a hardcore wrestling fan. No Nascar for me though.Report
To soon.Report
To be fair to Saul, at least he doesn’t like sports and also doesn’t like genre nerdy things. His snobbishness is consistent. 🙂
The most amusing thing (and by amusing, I think silly as hell), is people who get into intense debates about differences between film and comic versions of superheroes acting like having knowledge of sports is some weird ‘normy’ thing they could never have.
Frankly, it makes my estimation of anybody who uses the phrase ‘sportsball’ in a serious way drop a little bit. Fine, don’t be interested in sports. Just don’t think that makes you a better person because you obsess over Game of Thrones instead of the Super Bowl.
Also, on topic – the hate for LeBron thoroughly confuses me. I mean, in Cleveland, I got it. But the rest of the country’s hate for LeBron is kind of frustrating when there’s so much love for Michael Jordan. The truth is, if there was social media in 1992 like there is now, Jordan would be hated far more than LeBron, because after all, according to all the knowledge we have, Michael Jordan is far worse a human being than LeBron is.Report
LeBron’s half hour ESPN special to announce that he was leaving Cleveland was peculiarly ham-fisted. There also is some feeling out there that an organically grown (i.e. through the draft) winning team is more admirable than one assembled through free agency, though this doesn’t make a whole lot of sense in a sport with a salary cap. The sense I got was a feeling that the Heat was a group of superstars artificially assembling to bully everyone else. I’m not defending this feeling as being coherent.Report
There also is some feeling out there that an organically grown (i.e. through the draft) winning team is more admirable than one assembled through free agency
Did anyone make that criticism about the Celtics’ Big Three team? If so, I honestly don’t recall it. That argument seemed to be that it was wrong for players to assemble themselves into teams as if they were GMs.Report
But, if The Decision was a 5 on the “awkward and ham fisted” scale, MJ’s Hall of Fame speech is an eleven.
On the creation of superteams thing, if three stars get together on their own, it’s a horrible miscarriage of justice. On the other hand, if you happen to be the NBA champions and get the #1 pick thanks to a series of horrible trades that the NBA had to create a rule to stop it, that’s perfectly reasonable and should be celebrated.Report
I hate the phrase sportsball. I’m not into sports much either but I appreciate live basketball and baseball games more than Saul. I also like working out more than Saul does though and was on a sports team in high school and college, fencing. However, I think that there is some basic obligation to be aware of what is popular be it sports or Swift Taylor and mocking it as common or mundane is not fine.Report
It amused Mrs. LWA to no end that once while I was intensely focused on a painting, she entered the room and asked “Can a light saber cut through adamantium?”
And I stopped, pushed up my glasses, and gave a long detailed answer, after of course a deep serious reflection showing that I appreciated the gravity of the issue.Report
I wonder if there’s a bar in pdx playing the game tonight…Report
I’d be surprised if there’s a bar in the country that isn’t.Report
Probably. Statistics and the Intetnet are in your side.Report
“And don’t get me wrong, everyone playing with James is working their asses off. But those players playing their asses off should still equate to being run out of the building by the Golden State Warriors phoning it in”
I think this understates it, actually. The Warriors were historically great during the regular season. They were the league’s best defensive team and second-best offensive team (and I believe they were first there until the last day or two of the year). Of the 8 teams that have won as many games of them (67) and compiled a 10+ point differential, all but one won the Finals… and the one that didn’t lost to another team that matched that feat. Again, this team is HISTORICALLY EXCELLENT — 538 had them as the 4th best all time coming into the series — and they are being matched by LeBron James and some spare parts.
Seriously. He is breaking basketball.Report
My joke was that they’re being beaten by LeBron, an Aussie, a Russian, and some discarded Knicks, but the more concise version on Twitter was, “LeBron and some guys he picked up at the local Y.”Report
Please… like the Y would let JR Smith in.Report
I’m with ya, Tod. It’s absolutely amazing to watch. When the season began, Cleveland’s starting rotation was Irving, Love, Verajao, and Waiters. They’re all out. So basically, Lebron is beating the Warriors with the number 6 thru 9 guys on the roster, against the pre-playoffs odds-on favorite to win it all. I mean, once Love went down most of the “smart guys” wrote Cleveland off. Once Irving went down, everyone wrote em off. Including me, of course. What he’s doing is just incredible.Report
@stillwater Yeah, exactly. And more than just 6-9, because they used the Heat model, and loaded up salary dollars on multiple superstars and hoped that would overcome a bunch of scrubs taking the rest of the slots.
We are in agreement: just incredible.Report
Whoa. Warriors are starting Iguodala. Which makes sense since he’s been their best player in this series. He makes Lebron work. Scores, too, when they give im the ball.Report
Playing him off the bench was an obvious disaster all along.Report
Tune in Sunday for another crack at history!Report
Hey, Hey, LBJ
How many shots did you clank today?Report
And the Warriors take it.Report