Why the NBA is becoming lame

Life is good. Even though we're on the cusp of Christmas/New Years vacation, my the prospects for joy are good.  Why am I so merry, you ask? Simple. The NBA is back!! The perfect Christmas gift!

Or not.

Back when I was a kid dunking on 7" foot basketball goals, I was an NBA fanatic.  I was enamored with the Michael Jordan's and Vince Carter's of the league.  All I wanted to do was to watch the recap of the day's highlights, which were mostly filled with some crazy athlete driving in for a monstrous dunk.

But as I grew older and started playing for a real team that played real basketball, I started to see how lame the NBA really is.  The 3 second defensive lane violation, the outlawing of zone defenses, and other rules like them are designed to promote 1on1 "And one" street ball. No longer is passing the ball around the arc the most effective way to score; it's all Kobe Bryant taking it 1on1 on his man, driving for the dunk or otherwise pulling up for a jump shot.

Thanks to the demand of school and extra-curricular activities, I couldn't afford to waste my time watching anything but the Finals in high school, but that didn't stop my teammates from doing so. Of course, I didn't need to inquire who were the fans of the NBA; it was readily obvious who the ones were by the way they played.  Their idea of great basketball was them dribbling up the court, dribbling around their man, and - you guessed it - more dribbling through the lane for the play of the gamewild shot or turnover. There goes their starting spots.

Okay, but as bad as it is to patent your game like the pros, it's even worse to make them into your role models.  "Who are your heros?" I would ask them. "Umm, lets see - MJ, Lebron, Kobe, and aahhh,[insert favorite player here]. " was the inevitable response.  Theirs is a life of spectatorship. 

And on top of this trainwreck, the league is piling up more turn-offs.  Players no longer have the traditional team allegiances that made possible the rivalries (i.e Celtics vs Lakers, Bulls vs Pistons) which made the league a blessing to watch. Every time you check NBA.com there's always news about some big name player going to another team, usually to join up with some other superstar.  The Miami Heat represent everything that is wrong with this setup.  Here they turned 3 solid teams, each with a superstar, into one blown-up team and two other crappy ones.  Now nobody wants to watch the Cleveland vs Toronto or Toronto vs Miami.

Whats transpiring is that the NBA, with each additional lopsided team, is becoming like British Soccer, where all everyone talks about is the Arsenal and Manchester United.  It's stupid, and David Stern shouldn't let this happen.  (and if anybody comes to me saying the teams and players should do whatever they want to, I don't want to hear it.  These people imagine themselves clever because they can apply their fetish for free-market economics to the sports world, when actually there is nothing free-market about denying the NBA as an association to make decisions.)

I still watch Pro Basketball on occasion, and I'll even talk about its latest happenings with my more sports-inclined friends, but the direction it has taken is not for good.

And no, I don't watch college basketball. The only time I got into it was when Syracuse won the Championship back in 2003. Those were the days...

How Soccer Explains the World Part 1

Its almost hard to articulate a review of Franklin Foer's book How Soccer Explains The World, simply because it is a series of anecdotes whose relationship to each other is there, but hard to capture. But I will settle for a synopsis. The title of the book is meant to be hyperbole, as the subtitle an {unlikely} theory of globalization indicates.

But Foer does not disappoint in showing the significant influences the game has on culture, particularly in the areas where soccer is the most popular sport - like in Europe and Brazil - and how it has stood firm under the waves of globalization.

Foer is a world-class journalist who has traveled to ten different countries to examine the role of soccer. His outstanding narrative abilities leap out as he weaves through interviews of soccer aficionados through all echelons of fandom, from average fans to team owners to actual players, provides historical background, and recounts his own experiences.  In doing so he reveals a world that so few Americans have any idea about.

He devotes one chapter to each of the places he traveled to.  Below are short recaps of the first three chapters, more of which will be forthcoming:
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His first chapter "How Soccer Explains The Gangster's Paradise," goes over the Ultra Bad Boy, the hooligan gang of Red Star, a team in Serbia.  Under the Serb Arkin's leadership, what became known as the Tigers developed into a paramilitary unit that would fight the Croatians.  If Sports have traditionally been a metaphor for war, then Arkin blurred the two into the same thing.  He was merciless in his behind-the-scenes threats to opposing teams, even going so far as to shoot an opposing player's knee if he did the unthinkable and scored on them.

After reading about the corruption and violence that characterizes the milieu of the Serbian soccer complex, it becomes forcibly clear that it is not an equivalent to the NBA or NFL.

But such circumstances are not confined to Serbia.  In his second Chapter, "How Soccer Explains the Pornography of Sects" Foer travels to Scotland, where the conflict between the protestant Rangers and the catholic Celtics can be just as violent and passionate.  The vulgarity and fervor exhibited in the fan standoffs make the historical contention between the L.A Lakers and Boston Celtics look like a conversation among tea party ladies. No one donning a Celtic jacket can make it through a Ranger bar unmugged. And visa-versa. 

Turning away from the theme of violence, Foer proceeds to discuss the role soccer has played in restoring Jewish pride, in his chapter "How Soccer explains the Jewish question."  Max Nordau, one of the architects of turn-of-the century Zionism, said that the victims of antisemitism suffered from judendot, meaning "Jewish distress." He wrote: In the narrow Jewish streets, our poor limbs forgot how to move joyfully; in the gloom of sunless houses our eyes became accustomed to nervous blinking: out of fear of constant persecution the timbre of our voices was extinguished to an anxious whisper. 

To combat this Jewish distress, he  formed the doctrine of Muskeljudentum, which can be translated into "Muscular Judaism."  In order to recreate their body politic, Nordau argued, the Jews had to recreate their bodies.  Nordau proposed creating athletic facilities where the Jews could play sports.  And to a certain extent, they thrived; out of the fifty-two Olympic medals won by Austria in the forty year period between 1896 and 1936, eighteen of them were awarded to Jews.
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In all of these cases, the three that have been outlined as well as the other seven, soccer acts as an object people latch on to to satisfy their innate tribalistic needs.  Especially in the European Union, where nationalism has given way to incipient globalism, people gravitate toward their soccer teams as a source of identity.  This human inclination to associate itself by groups has been confirmed time and again by history, observation, introspection, and studies.