Restatement

Wow, that basketball post from yesterday was a mess. I changed directions about three times there. Maybe it's because I almost fell asleep on the bus home from work, so I was actually more alert later on, when I wrote about coy vampires. Anyway, I was trying to communicate, in the end, a few different things, which I'll do much more briefly this time around:

(1) You should read The Last Shot. Everyone should read it. It's a fantastic book, and if you're not interested in basketball just pretend it's about something else you're not interested in but willing to read a compelling and well written book about. It's reporting on events that happened, now, almost twenty years ago, but like its logical companion piece Hoop Dreams (aka the only three hour documentary I watched twice in one day because I was so blown away by it), all that's changed is that rap is more integrated into the mainstream and hairstyles are different. Since the NBA instituted its deplorable age limit, the situation is exactly the same. Except that people are getting paid a lot more now, and the sneaker-sponsored AAU summer league teams are possibly more influential now (though the sneaker market itself is shrinking; I don't know yet what this portends).

(2) I don't know why I went on about Marbury - not someone I spend much time thinking about, NBA-wise - except that, especially as viewed by reading The Last Shot and The Jump at the same time, he is a fascinating figure. I suppose I was trying to complicate the kneejerk reaction towards a particular kind of athlete by saying that his context and upbringing account for a lot of what makes him difficult to like today; if he didn't have those negative qualities, he might well have gotten lost before making it as an NBA player, instead of getting lost after making millions of dollars. Plus I accidentally stumbled into something else: in The Last Shot, one heartbreaking refrain is that parents and educators alike continually wonder if there's something specially wrong with their neighborhood: why, when Lincoln High has been a dominant force in the Public School Athletic League for years, had it never sent an athlete to a Division 1 program? Why do they all struggle to make the 700 on their SATs? The average background for an NBA All-Star is probably something like "poor and disadvantaged but not hopeless." Coney Island at the time of The Last Shot was hopeless. The extra hurdles and damages incurred for a talented athlete to survive Coney Island vs. a rough neighborhood in Oakland in the same time period may account for a lot of the difference between Stephon Marbury and Gary Payton.

(3) One of the main reasons why I was spurred to try and write that post is because I was trying to articulate why, beyond my pure love of the game, I find basketball so engrossing: more than any other sport, the matrix of social issues that surround pro basketball is to my way of thinking indicative and relevant to a lot of things going on socially in America at large. (Or, alternatively, the social issues relevant to basketball are the ones I'm interested in.) The whole system of basketball education, development, and recruitment for - as ultimate goal - the pro game is broken, corrupt, exploitative, and, as I said in the prior post, fetid, rotten, ill. But that's not just of interest to basketball; the System here is an extension, and expression, of the Larger System affecting America overall, and by understanding the exceptional specifics of this instance we find ourselves having larger discussions about race, class, education, social justice, and, to get broad and sentimental, what we want from our public figures and what we want for our children.