Look up, obey, repeat

Conventional wisdom likes to say that true sports fans would rather watch a game in person than sit at home in front of the television, that regardless of the distance of one’s seat from the field, the price of one’s hot dog, or the boorishness of one’s section-mates, the experience of actually being at a game is the highest form of sports appreciation and the purest proof of one’s devotion to the game or team one loves.

What a bunch’a nonsense.

And not just because it’s predicated on that most absurd of sports-fan delusions: that I can affect the outcome of a game by my presence, that somehow my favorite players will sense my closeness and my enthusiasm and respond accordingly. No, quite outside of our individual powers of spatial persuasion or the inconvenience of getting to the arena or the irritation of standing next to grown men who have voluntarily painted their own faces or the impossibility of actually seeing what’s happening on-field or on-court from the seats I’m able to afford on a writer’s salary, the real problem with attending a live game goes right to the heart of the mob, right to the jugular of America, right to the crux of the culture, with its never-ending quest to dumb down experience in the name of accessibility and greater profitability. Let’s call it the Calamity of the JumboTron and the Hive Sporting Mind.

It pains me to say this, but I think the NBA – that noblest of all leagues – is the institution most tainted by the presence of the JumboTron. (Hockey as well, I’m guessing, but who watches hockey?) Baseball, soccer, and football stadiums? They all feature JumboTron screens, but the combination of their enormity and the fact that most of them are outdoors (causing a diffusion of crowd attention) means the screens serve mainly as tools for keeping crowds informed or engaged during timeouts with slow-motion replays of injury-inducing collisions and tricycle races between grown men dressed as pancakes.

In NBA arenas, on the other hand, the JumboTron is the center of attention. It hovers ominously right over the middle of the court, like the alien ships in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a testament to human ingenuity at the expense of human experience. It holds all the stats for all the players on the court, it provides instant replays, it shows highlights from other games, it pumps up the crowd with classic rock songs, it runs advertisements during time-outs, and, most significantly, it tells fans what to do and how to feel and where to stand and what to cheer to most effectively be a part of what is going on down on the court.

At an NBA game, fans look to the JumboTron for guidance, validation, and corroboration.

Which is unforgiveable in itself (who wants to be told what to do by a giant television set?), but the real problem is this: The JumboTron-centered approach to presenting sporting events is absolutely killing fan understanding and appreciation by encouraging ignorance and what we’ll call “passive immersion.” And by this I mean that any lunk off the street with the price of a ticket in dollars bills in his pocket but no knowledge of the game in his head can sit down in one of those tiny seats and, simply by concentrating on the JumboTron and the sound of the arena announcer’s voice and doing what they tell him to do, can play perfectly the role of the dutiful fan doing his part to cheer his team on to victory and boo the opponent on to defeat and shame.

Don’t know what an “And 1″ means? Don’t worry: the JumboTron will tell you if it’s worth a cheer or a grumble. Don’t know what to do when your hometown team has the ball at the end of the fourth quarter down by one? No fear; the JumboTron will tell you what kind of noise it’s best to make to prod your team on to victory. Not sure what to chant when the other team has the ball at the end of the fourth quarter down by one? Why not take a cue from the JumboTron: “De-fense! De-fense!” should just about do it, don’t you think?

So what do you get? An uneducated sporting crowd responding to the entreaties of a giant television screen with obedience but absolutely no feel for the actual organic ebb and flow of a game. The JumboTron programmers took their cues (at one point in history) from the natural responses of true fans in certain conditions at certain points in certain games (standing up for the last possession of any quarter, for example, or trying with all one’s might to distract an opposing player standing alone at the free-throw line). Then they codified those responses, ritualized them, turned them into an elaborate, agreed-upon choreography completely free of honest feeling and stripped them of all meaning.

The last time I went to see the San Antonio Spurs play (during a playoff game, mind you, when the only fans in attendance should have been die-hards with an encyclopedic knowledge of the game and an unreasonable affection for Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili and 15-foot bank shots), the entire three-hour experience was an exercise in predetermined responses and prefabricated enthusiasm. There was no respect given to either our ability to amass and retain knowledge or our instincts for the rise and fall of tension within the parameters of a group experience.

Compare that to a boxing match here I went to recently here in Austin. The evenings were so far apart in kind and significance as to constitute completely different experiences; in fact, the only thing binding them together was the word “sports.”

At the fights there were countless moments of spontaneous crowd engagement – a burst of “ooohs” when a fighter did something particularly dazzling, a collective groan when a punch landed with exceptional force, great roars of approval and applause for two bruised and bloodied men who were just about to finish round 12 in one piece. And all without a JumboTron telling them to “Make Some Noise.” Not only were fans allowed to respond naturally to the goings on inside the ring, at the pace and with the enthusiasm they deemed appropriate, and not only were they permitted to let their own knowledge of and instincts for the fighting dictate those responses; they got to lose themselves in the collective consciousness of a true crowd experience – rather than hand themselves over to the dictates of a piece of technology. It wasn’t a night where the crowd was being herded into action by an active appeal to hive-mindedness but where the basest, most chemical reactions to the brutality, grace, and athleticism on display were expected and appreciated, even demanded.

It was live sports at its finest.

Stayed tuned in the weeks ahead for More Reasons I’d Rather Watch the Game at Home Than Go to the Arena, in which you, the reader, will:

•  Marvel at the tale of a full-grown adult male pounding thunder sticks together to the rhythm of every tiny bit of incidental music playing over the arena loudspeaker in a thrilling attempt to keep from thinking for himself about anything!

• Thrill at the sight of thousands of otherwise sentient beings falling all over themselves, their neighbors, their friends, and their family members in a joyous attempt to secure team souvenirs they don’t even want just because they’re free and happen to have been shot out of a T-shirt cannon by professional cheerleaders!

• Wonder at the thought of human beings rioting, setting fires indoors, beating up strangers, getting crushed to death, and otherwise indulging in all manner of drunken mayhem, all in the name of athletic appreciation and team loyalty!

Market-Tested Portrait of a Modern-Day Hero

So, you’re LeBron James – newly minted MVP of the NBA, co-captain of the U.S. national team that just reclaimed the Olympic gold medal, worldwide marketing phenomenon, and poster boy for all things decent in the American sporting character. You’re 24 years old, you made $31 million last year, and you’re fitting your 11-bedroom mansion with a bowling alley and a barbershop. Everyone who knows anything about basketball has you penciled in for a career that may match or even exceed that of Michael Jordan. You’ve got the world, in other words, on a string.

Then word starts getting around that some no-name player from some no-name college in Louisiana had the gall to dunk on you at your own Nike-sponsored summer basketball camp. Dunk on you, King James, the heir apparent, the Chosen One, and all that – at your own Nike camp. And worse than that, rumors start to spread that more than one person sitting in the stands at the game was videotaping you getting posterized by a kid no one’s ever heard of and whose name would never otherwise be typed in the same magazine as yours.

So what do you do?

The smart money is nothing, right? Laugh it off, shrug it off, suffer a few days of minor embarrassment as the  footage makes its way onto YouTube and then sports-highlight shows and finally a few late-night comedy shows, and then move on. Maybe go on a talk show yourself to jokingly explain away how the whole thing happened – say you were sick with malaria that day or missing a leg or too concerned about the teetering state of Obama’s health care plan to concentrate on sending the kid’s ball, and the kid himself, flying into the fourth row. Use the situation to draw attention to some pet charitable cause. Then, as former NBA player and coach and current TV announcer Doug Collins suggests Jordan would have done, you invite the kid to a game of one-on-one and crush him in front of his friends and family.

Anyway, that would be the human thing to do.

But we’re talking about the NBA in 2009, so expecting the human thing is pure wishful thinking.

No, instead of playing it cool, James, or Nike officials at James’ behest, or Nike officials not officially at James’ behest but with James’ tacit approval, confiscated the video of two different videographers because, they claimed, videotaping of after-hours pickup games was a no no. And the rules are the rules.

Make those tapes disappear, in other words, before anyone sees a mere mortal taking a basketball demigod to the hole.

So now the situation is a bit of a mess for LeBron and his carefully cultivated image. As Sports Illustrated columnist Phil Taylor put it last Thursday, “[T]he attempt to suppress the evidence was a miscalculation by James, which wouldn’t be a big deal if it weren’t his second misstep in recent weeks. The great dunk cover-up comes on the heels of his rather ungracious exit from the playoffs in late May, when he drew criticism for leaving the court after the Cavs’ elimination without bothering to shake a single Orlando player’s hand. Neither of these is a major offense, of course, but taken together, they do point to a troubling possibility. Could it be that LBJ, who had until now shown such unerring public relations instincts, is beginning to take himself too seriously?

“Some diva tendencies are starting to show … presenting yourself as a sore loser or a thin-skinned star is no way to keep the public on your side.”

Apparently “diva tendencies” are the only thing James needs to worry about here. But it seems to me the ramifications of “Dunk Gate” (my term, though not my proudest literary moment) go far beyond the petulant, and poorly thought-through, reaction of a spoiled superstar. We’re too accustomed to narcissistic superstar behavior to care about stuff like that anyway. In fact, we like our stars to act like divas. We want them doing things we’d never have the gall to do, getting away with things we’d never even contemplate. We can’t get enough stories about athletes or singers or movie stars destroying hotel rooms or mistreating restaurant staff or cavorting with strippers or throwing people through windows. It makes them seem human, more relatable, less like deities and more like people with flaws and tempers and jealousy and self-delusions. Just like us, only much, much better.

As long as they keep acting human, we keep loving them. Which is why James’ quick exit from the court after losing to Orlando in the playoffs didn’t bother me, even though it was all sports commentators were talking about the next day: “LeBron James – carefully constructed and maintained marketing phenomenon and portrait of the new, more decent, more sportsmanlike, less ‘urban’ NBA – refused to shake hands with his opponents after losing! Might a crack in the veneer of commercial perfection be starting to show? Is the image wearing thin?”

Absolutely not. Sure, no one likes a sore loser, but there could be nothing more human than to want to storm out of public view and out of the camera eye after watching your golden season come to a whimpering end. Watching LeBron sulk his way into the locker room and disappear from the stadium without talking to the press made me like him as a human being for the first time – because it was the first time I’d seen him act like a human being. James’ preternatural air of constant goodness and unerring, prefabricated nobility up until that point always struck me as a false face. Or more to the point: a commercially constructed face built for maximum cross-marketing profitability. Every time he spoke at a press conference or appeared on a commercial or smiled during a game, I got the sense that I was watching the world’s first living, breathing, slam-dunking human billboard – a cyborg sports phenom built in a lab by a team of Nike, Gatorade, and State Farm scientists to project the world’s most perfect image of corporate synergy.

No blood, no heart, no tears, just money wrapped in muscles.

Which is why I found “Dunk Gate” so disappointing. Not because James was acting like a diva, but because he had clearly learned a lesson from his little show of emotion after game six in Orlando and decided he needed to re-establish his role as the perfect Madison Avenue automaton. Team LeBron didn’t see their golden man-child getting dunked on as a shot at his pride; they saw it as a shot at his infallibility. Which is dangerous when infallibility is the image you’re using to sell the world sneakers and bubblegum. If James were really human, he wouldn’t have cared that much if some kid had gotten lucky and beaten him to the basket while he was trying to recover from the weak side. But he’s not really human, so he and his programmers decided to shut down the possibility that his image as the Greatest had somehow been tarnished.

If this all sounds creepy, it’s because it is. James is the leading voice of a new generation of athletes who were born in the Michael Jordan Age, who came to consciousness in an era when athletes weren’t merely athletes but marketing tools. Guys as young as James don’t remember that before Michael Jordan and his financial team took over, athletes were good for the occasional shill or two but weren’t defined by the companies they shilled for. Jordan took the whole idea of corporate sponsorship and turned it into a means of self-identification. Jordan was Nike and Nike was Jordan; one didn’t exist without the other. And that’s how they wanted it.

This generation now ascendant in the NBA – the James generation, the D-Wade generation, the Dwight Howard generation – they are the first generation that never knew a time before Michael Jordan and his integrative, immersive approach to marketing as personal identity. As far as they know, personality is meaningless outside the context of salesmanship and image-branding. So little surprise that they’re so free of controversy, so polite, such good commercial actors, such portraits of sportsmanship and common decency. Unlike, say, the older (and apparently more dangerous) Allen Iversons and Latrell Sprewells of the world, they see being able to look good while holding a Coke can as just as intrinsic a part of being a great athlete as shooting a basketball.

So for my money, the problem here has nothing to do with being a diva or a bad sport, about having tattoos or wearing corn-rows, about yelling at referees or cursing at fans or getting caught snorting cocaine. It’s something darker and more sinister, something far more damaging for impressionable kids to see and admire. This issue is related to the total supremacy of capitalism, the triumph of marketability over humanity. This is about the deification of a being who has voluntarily made himself into a corporate cyborg afraid of nothing more than tarnishing a profitable image – not by acts of deviance or misguided passion but by showing imperfection. Kids these days are growing up worshipping men who view human behavior as inconsistent with success and believing that the highest mark of accomplishment and global citizenship is having the most profitable and most diversified sponsorship portfolio possible – human life, human rights, or just plain human reactions be damned.

Champions or Financial Windfall?

How the Yearly Cries for Parity in Sports Miss the Point

Sometimes I wonder, if you polled a thousand sports fans and asked them if they’d prefer to spend their lives watching their favorite teams play or talking about their favorite teams during the off-season, how many would choose the latter.

For example, it would be easy to assume that someone who’s obsessed with football would look at the possibility of a life filled with NFL games – every single Sunday without exception, 22 grown men in tight pants barreling into each other with great force and animosity, world without end – as the best of all possible worlds. But I’m not sure that if given the choice most true sports fans wouldn’t rather exist in some eternal, unblemished off-season, where everything is still perfect and possible, where the hopes of favorite teams are still unwritten and un-dashed, where players are being traded and shuffled and moved about and speculated upon and idealized, and where – most importantly – arguing over the potential and fates of teams and leagues moves front and center while those teams and leagues retreat into their caves. The off-season is the time of year when fans feel like their voices can be heard, when they feel important. Which is nonsense, of course, but the world is full of nonsense and who am I to judge?

Right now, the NBA is deep into its long summer’s nap. The season has been over for a month, replaced by a delicate dance of trades, mid-level exceptions, contract buyouts, salary caps, and luxury tax thresholds: a chess game with human pieces. And sports writers are using the lull in the action on the court to theorize about the action off. Because the off-season is when everyone becomes a philosopher, employing the mystic arts of syllogism and logarithm and catechism to best explain how badly, for example, the Cleveland Cavaliers screwed up by trading for Shaquille O’Neal.

In a recent editorial for ESPN.com, basketball writer J.A. Adande broached one of the all-time favorite topics in the history of professional sports: the battle between the haves and the have-nots for the soul of true competition. Fans of almost every sport indulge themselves in this conversation at least once a year. Outside of the NFL (which has a hard salary cap, unlike the NBA, which has a soft salary cap that it allows teams to exceed in return for luxury taxes), the “Are the rich teams trying to buy a championship” argument is one of the eternals, something to depend on, something to believe in. When’s the last time the Yankees or the Red Sox weren’t accused of trying to spend their way to a title? What fan of Leeds or Mallorca doesn’t begrudge the enormous payrolls of Chelsea and Real Madrid? Without these teams around, what would we complain about?

So, in the name of tradition, Adande recently put pen to paper to bemoan the stagnation at the top of the NBA standings and put the blame on the shoulders of the soft salary cap and next season’s low luxury-tax threshold, both of which, he argues, benefit the already wealthy teams of the league who can afford to spend, spend, spend, while forcing poorer teams to shed payroll by shedding well-paid players and, by Euclid’s Associative Law of First and Last Principles, shedding their chance at a title.

“So the NBA elite is a stagnant circle,” he writes, after putting forth the argument that we’re doomed to share another NBA post-season with the Lakers, Celtics, Spurs, Cavs, and Magic, “while the rest of the league has been taxed into timidity. No one’s willing or able to take the bold steps to vault into contention … The tax doesn’t deter the best teams from pursuing more free agents, while teams that fear the tax will have to shed players even more furiously in order to stay tax-free.”

This argument drives me nuts for so many reasons, I’m not even sure where to begin. Perhaps here:

The Siren’s Song of Parity

Adande argues that having elite teams is somehow bad for the quality of play in the NBA, as if parity across the divisions and conferences would raise the bar for the whole league and result in more exciting games throughout the season.  “Fans don’t care about the spreadsheets or ledgers of the teams,” he argues. “What they want to see is competitive balance.”

This is ridiculous. Fans are interested in greatness and entertainment, not competitive balance.

Parity sounds nice as an idea, but by nature it spits in the face of the sporting ideal: that one team, using whatever advantages or disadvantages they have – be they financial, spiritual, historical, tragical-comical – bests another fair and square on a free and visible field. In sports as in life, not everyone deserves a trophy; not everyone earns a spot in the history books. And if they did, those honors would be meaningless. No, best that we have disparity, that we have great teams providing us great games in the post-season, where this sort of thing really matters, rather than even and equal teams giving us even and equal games throughout the regular season, when they don’t. Lesser teams should feel free to claw their way out of ignominy if they care so much.

The Myth of the Rich

Contrary to popular belief, the size of a team’s payroll is a lousy predictor of success. The last time I checked, the New York Yankees paid out more to their players last year – a year they didn’t even make the playoffs – than the GDP of several small nations. Take a look at these payroll stats from last year’s NBA season:

1. New York Knicks $ 97,085,751
2. Toronto Raptors $ 95,358,923
3. Dallas Mavericks $ 93,215,017
4. Cleveland Cavaliers $ 90,794,387
5. Los Angeles Lakers $ 80,745,793
6. Boston Celtics $ 78,738,973
7. Detroit Pistons $ 77,046,985
8. Memphis Grizzlies $ 75,819,691
9. Phoenix Suns $ 75,449,279
10. Orlando Magic $ 74,863,198
11. Philadelphia 76ers $ 74,434,445
12. Sacramento Kings $ 71,517,217
13. Chicago Bulls $ 71,487,984
14. Washington Wizards $ 70,558,149
15. Milwaukee Bucks $ 70,220,238
16. Indiana Pacers $ 69,623,798
17. Houston Rockets $ 68,761,285
18. San Antonio Spurs $ 68,403,480
19. Atlanta Hawks $ 68,165,839
20. Charlotte Bobcats $ 68,004,277
21. Denver Nuggets $ 67,068,631
22. New Orleans Hornets $ 67,017,804
23. Utah Jazz $ 66,266,407
24. Minnesota Timberwolves $ 63,527,135
25. Golden State Warriors $ 63,287,110
26. New Jersey Nets $ 61,983,445
27. Los Angeles Clippers $ 61,883,344
28. Oklahoma City Thunder $ 61,534,722
29. Portland Trail Blazers $ 56,154,803
30. Miami Heat $ 50,031,123

Let’s see:

The teams with the top three payrolls in the league combined to do almost nothing last season. Sure, the Mavericks made it to the second round of the playoffs, but they beat an injury-ravaged Spurs team to get there, and, besides, you always sensed they were going to break at any moment. The Knick and the Raptors, meanwhile, were awful all season long.

You’ve got the two teams that played in the finals last year, the Lakers and the Magic, also in the top 10, which would seem to prove Adande’s point about the relationship between financial outlay and success. But then you also have the cosmically detached Pistons, the laughable Grizzlies, and the creaky Suns there as well, which would seem to prove the opposite.

In the middle of the table at 17, sit the Rockets, who very nearly knocked the future champion Lakers out of the playoff despite the fact that their starting lineup consisted of three old men, a Shetland pony, and a bag of marbles. And at 18, you have the Spurs, who are the league’s most successful franchise over the last decade.

And bringing up the rear are two exciting young teams, the Trailblazers and the Heat, who lit up the early rounds of the playoffs before flaming out, destined to return and improve with age and experience.

The point of all this is that payroll isn’t destiny, so what’s the point of instituting a parity system? If the Knicks can’t make the playoffs with a $97-million payroll, who are they going to beat with a $50-million payroll? The Washington Generals? The Bad News Bears? Lokomotiv Rostov? The French Foreign Legion? These guys?

The Spurs have been a great team for 10 full years not because they have the highest-paid players but because they’re well-coached, disciplined, hard-working, decent, smiling, god-fearing, non-smoking, tooth-brushing, vegetable-eating, good, honest Americans. (Who may, now that I think about it, actually be from France or Argentina.) The Los Angeles Clippers, on the other hand, have had a perfectly reasonable roster for years, but you could cover the team in money, lavish its players with fragrances and gifts from the orient, and pump the entire franchise full of gold, and they would still be the Los Angeles Clippers, an unruly band of underachievers led by a man who couldn’t coach his way into a paper bag much less out of one and yet who still, year after year after painful year,  keeps his job.

No amount of money could ever make up for that level of incompetence and stubbornness, nor could any salary cap.

Ribbons for Participation

“Last year,” Anande writes “the Boston Celtics, Los Angeles Lakers, San Antonio Spurs, Cleveland Cavaliers and Orlando Magic were considered the top contenders for the NBA championship. Since then, we’ve seen Shaquille O’Neal, Rasheed Wallace, Vince Carter, Richard Jefferson and Hedo Turkoglu have changed teams. We’ve seen the election of a black president, an economic meltdown, civil uprisings in Iran and the death of pop superstar Michael Jackson. And after all those changes and some 275 revolutions of the Earth, who are the top contenders for the NBA championship? The Boston Celtics, Los Angeles Lakers, San Antonio Spurs, Cleveland Cavaliers and Orlando Magic.”

Fine. That’s probably true. From last year to this, the teams considered most likely to compete for a title haven’t really changed. But that’s just one year to another. Five years ago, the Celtics, the Cavaliers, and the Magic weren’t in the championship conversation at all. Meanwhile where are the Suns, the Mavs, and the Pistons today?

Besides, isn’t there something to be said for watching great teams battle it out year after year, for watching a rivalry grow, for watching teams learn each other and suss out the other’s weaknesses? Who was complaining back when Larry Bird and Magic Johnson were going at it every year? Show me any true basketball fan who got tired of the Lakers vs. the Kings in the early 2000s. Don’t we all dream of 10 years of LeBron vs. D-Wade vs. Carmelo vs. Dwight Howard? Wouldn’t that be a pleasant decade for us? Why oh why do we need to shake things up so that the Wizards or the Thunder feel included? This isn’t church camp or elementary school. Not everyone in sports deserves recognition or a spot in the playoffs. Not everyone gets a turn. The reason why great teams form around players like LeBron and Wade and Howard (all in cities, by the way, where there were lousy teams before those players arrived) is because great players attract other great players and great coaches and more fans and more revenue, meaning they can afford more and greater players and coaches, meaning their chances for coming back to compete for a title grow with each passing year.

Why shouldn’t we celebrate that: greatness growing greatness? Why lift up teams who’ve done nothing to merit consideration and try to level off the teams that are capable of truly remarkable things? In the end, all sports fans want is to see magic, to see fireworks, to believe in something. And the best way to ensure that that never happens is to spread the wealth, thin out the herd, and snuff out the flames.