A Change in the Wind

Shocker! NBA Drops Unenforceable Rule On Traveling

During the new season beginning today, National Basketball Association refs will now allow players two steps after "the gather" before they must shoot, pass, or be charged with a violation.

This has been the unofficial practice for approximately ever.

Lakers coach Phil Jackson had a typically acerbic response to the change:

"Well, I guess if you can't call it, you just regulate it as a rule," Jackson quipped about something players had been doing for years. "But, it's really hard to digest that as a person that's been in basketball for as long as I've been in basketball, that we're just going to give in to this new rule of doing it."

Never give a ref an inch, is Phil's attitude, I guess, but the truth is that at the speed these pros play, figuring out where "the gather" occurs is not nearly as easy as casual fans like to think. More power to the NBA for recognizing the unenforceable reality staring it in the face on national television.

And after all, what does the game have to fear? We now have a president with hops! Amazing.

George Orwell Pooh-Poohs the NBA Finals

Well, not exactly, but if he were here today, Orwell would no doubt mock it as part of "the lunatic modern habit...of seeing everything in terms of competitive prestige."

Here, from a memorable essay called "The Sporting Spirit," in a newspaper column from December 14, 1945, Orwell speaks (taken from George Packer's great Facing Unpleasant Facts collection):

I am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates goodwill between the nations, and that if only the common peoples of the world could meet one another at football or cricket, they would have no inclination to meet on the battlefield. Even if one didn't know from concrete examples (the 1936 Olympics, for instance) that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred, one could deduce it from general principles...

Nearly all the sports practiced nowadays are competitive. You play to win, and the game has little meaning unless you do your utmost to win. On the village green, where you pick up sides and no feeling of local patriotism is involved, it is possible to play simply for the fun and the exercises; but as soon as the question of prestige arises, as soon as you feel that you and some larger unit will be disgraced if you lose, the most savage competitive instincts are aroused...instead of blah-blahing about the clean, healthy rivalry of the football field and the great part played by the Olympic Games in bringing the nations together, it is more useful to inquire how and why this modern cult of sport arose. Most of the games we now play are of ancient origin, but sport does not seem to have been taken very seriously between Roman times and the 19th-century. Even in the English public schools the games cult did not start till the later part of the last century...then, chiefly in England and the United States, games were built up into a heavily-financed activity, capable of attracting vast crowds and rousing savage passions, and the infection spread from country to country. It is the most violently combative sports, football and boxing, that have spread the widest. There cannot be much doubt that hte whole thing is bound up with the rise of nationalism -- that is, with the lunatic modern habit of identifying oneself with large power units and seeing everything in terms of competitive prestige.

"Large power units"...like Shaquille O'Neal, for example, who has played for both Orlando and L.A.?

Always wondered how fans could root for a guy so bullying, but Orwell's right, it's not about the individual player, it's about power, especially to humiliate. Orwell interestingly goes on to point out that these kind of games mean more to those who don't actually exercise:

...organized games are more likely to flourish in urban communities where the average human being lives a sedentary or at least a confined life...in a rustic community a boy or young man works off a good deal of his surplus energy by walking, swimming, snowballing, climbing trees, riding horses, and by various sports involving cruelty to animals...in a big town one must indulge in group activities if one wants an outlet for one's physical strength or for one's sadistic impulses.

Well, why don't you tell us what you think, George, instead of beating around the bush? Jeez.

But he's right, you know -- in my basketball days as a younger man the guys I played with might sometimes watch televised sports, but many had a slightly disdainful attitude towards fans -- that is, fans were guys who couldn't actually play themselves, and so had to have others do it for them.

Because Orwell seems so modern to us, and so prescient, we sometimes forget how much of a country bumpkin he was...as anyone who checks in with his diary will attest, and David Levine drew in l966:

But Can Jesus Dunk?

Very Important News: the Lakers will be going, for the second year in a row, to the NBA Finals. This year they will win it all, mostly because of #24. As Denver coach George Karl put it, reported by snarky Los Angeles Times columnist TJ Simers:

"I think Jesus would have had trouble covering" Kobe Bryant.

When Karl's comment was relayed to Bryant, he said, "It's tough to say that's a compliment, you know what I mean? It's a tremendous honor . . . I don't know, I did a great job using my teammates, and they knocked shots down and put the defense into a position where I could play one-on-one a little bit and take advantage of that."

Added Simers:

        As you notice, he never denied that He would have had trouble covering him.

True enough, but here's my question: Why assume Jesus can play at this level? Because he can get up? One good head fake from Kobe might be enough to put him clean out of the building...

[pic from Robert Gauthier of the LA Times]

The Deep Spirituality of Basketball

It's the weekend; lightness is in order. Here's a spectacular lede to what is essentially a review of a book published by a website, the brainy and pretentious Free Darko.

Frankly, the review is better than the product. A lot better. Happens sometimes, especially on the web. Here's Sam Anderson, for New York magazine.

I believe, fervently, fundamentally, irrationally—like a big-tent revivalist speaking in tongues—in the deep spirituality of basketball. The game belongs in the same experiential category as space exploration, planting gardens, raising children, watching sunrises from 12,000-foot peaks, solving impossible math problems, and making emotional connections with lost animals. It is the ancient primal language in which the universe speaks human truth most plainly. My first sustained exposure to basketball was literally religious. As an adolescent I would skip church services along with the pastor’s son, sneak off to a nearby Sunday-school room, fire up the big TV on its rolling metal cart, and (primed by NBC’s theme music, the now-legendary John Tesh hymn “Roundball Rock”) sit down to earnestly study the feverish catechism of the early-nineties NBA—the heroism, villainy, violence, sacrifice, treachery, faith, and wisdom of Barkley, Stockton, Wilkins, Jordan, Pippen, Ewing, Rodman, Moncrief. After several pious months, this secret worship led to a spiritual transfer in which basketball supplanted Lutheranism as the official mythology of my youth. It succored me in times of hardship. When I got bullied in high school, I shot hundreds of free throws like someone reciting rosaries. I came to believe that the health of your jumper’s arc, the purity of your ball rotation, was a precise measure of your spiritual worth. When I tried out for my high-school team, it seemed that so much was at stake about my soul and its place in the universe that, before we’d even had a chance to run the first drill, I projectile-vomited all over the gym floor. (I didn’t make the team.)

After that, who cares what the anonobloggers for this site think about Scott Brooks? (Among other even more trivial topics.) I mean, really.

Celtics Get Off the Mat, Win Round One

Pierce sustains a strained knee; Perkins a strained ankle. But despite hearing "a pop" in his knee, Pierce overcomes the pain, comes out of the locker room. gets back into the game. Hits a couple of big shots, and the Celts pull out tgame one in Boston. Lakers rattle out a dozen shots, lose by less than ten. And the paper offers a digitized painting to help us remember, which echoes a Magic/Bird picture, looks cool...

Fakes Right, Goes Left: Obama's Favorite Move

Barack Obama became obsessed with basketball at one point in his life, not as a high schooler, surprisingly, but in law school.

You can see that love and skill in action if you watch the Bryant Gumbel special below on his game.

In the segment, for the first time on television since he was a kid, Obama plays. He wears a t-shirt and modest sweat pants. He plays in a funky gym with some servicemen and women, and helps win a game.

The move with which he wins the game is well-practiced, complex, and aggressive (but not hostile). He wins a game on a fake right, go left, spin back into the lane, bank-shot.

Take a look. Enjoy.

How natural Obama is; how much he obviously loves the game, how easily he becomes part of the flow.  He's not a jump shooter, he's a fast break guy, a get to the hoop guy. Your usual aggressive American.

Yet somehow he is unpatriotic, because he went to Harvard and taught at Chicago and lived in Hyde Park and served on a board with a man who in the 60's was a radical.

It's a "That's not America" claim, and it's bogus. No game is more American that basketball, invented in this country for something to do on cold Midwestern nights, Basketball, more than baseball, more that football, both of whom have root in English games, was born in the USA. And it's a game that found a new identity, and a powerful one, when black men were allowed to play, and changed everything.

I recall teaching a class as a young man in story analysis, being attacked by a student angry about a bad grade I had given out, and because I was attacked unfairly, by sheer luck won the sympathy of the class.

Up until that point the class had been respectful but not especially involved. Suddenly they began to listen to what I had to say. I think this preposterous "debate," in which ABC attacked Obama for all the trivial issues it could think of for as long as it could, will make Obama a more sympathetic figure, not less.

Here's hoping. And here's Barack on the court:

The Massive Courage of Sam I Am

From The Boston-Herald, a story about Sam Cassell as a Celtic: 

The Celtics still aren't quite sure what to make of Sam Cassell. 'Oh, Sam's crazy,' coach Doc Rivers said. 'No,' Paul Pierce said through a wide smile, 'he's only borderline crazy.' Watching the 38-year-old point guard strut and gesture -- and score 15 of his 20 points -- in the fourth quarter of Saturday's win in Atlanta, the rest of the C's were laughing with Cassell, not at him. The regulars were howling on the bench when he drilled a pair of late 3-pointers to humble the Hawks. They doubled over when he signaled toward his lower region to emphasize his massive ... uh, courage."

[Picture from Flickr user H.S. Hsiao of Sam Cassell:  ]

The Beauty of Humiliation (on the court)

Don't often drop in basketball links, but this poem by Sherman Alexie -- on an epochal humiliation -- is pretty wonderful. The culprit is now little remembered, but Alexie won't forget him -- James "Jammin" Bailey.