Elvis Done Left the Building

Not necessity, not desire - no, the love of power is the demon of men. Let them have everything - health, food, a place to live, entertainment - they are and remain unhappy and low-spirited: for the demon waits and waits and will be satisfied.
—Nietzsche

Fame blurs reality, imbuing the famous with a public identity that may or may not accurately depict their private selves, but which is controlled by the audience’s perceptions and biases rather than anything internal. The fastest way to alienate your public is to undermine your persona, to let the mask slip and imply, through word or deed, that they believe in a lie. The bigger the gap between persona and self, the higher the need for discipline in public.

Michael Jordan has long been the gold standard for this. The man is an asshole, as has been clear for a couple decades now to anyone who cares to look closely. He fought teammates, gambles compulsively, and would rather burn your house down than lose to you at rocks, paper, scissors.¹ But MJ, star of Space Jam, purveyor of underclothing, and silhouetted dunker extraordinaire, is American royalty. He turns on that 1000 watt smile, blandly plays the nice guy, and the world revolves around him. His anodyne persona is as distant as it is friendly, founded on his unimpeachable resume. He’s not famous because he’s good-looking, though he is, or because of his charm. He’s famous because he won everything ever, while selling you the shoes the cool kids have been wearing ever since.

1: It's not clear that this is an exaggeration if he thought he could get away with it.

The lack of substance to that persona is a fame judo trick that has served him perfectly since. At its core, the Airman fame isn’t about anything beyond cool. The Bulls were the coolest team ever, at least to the general public, because Count the Rings, and MJ was both the alpha dog and the coolest guy on the team. He transcended his entire sport, and invented the athlete as global celebrity. There are miles of distance in between MJ and the real Michael Jordan, but the cool distance built into the MJ persona keeps us at arm’s length, so it doesn’t matter.

The Jordan shoe brand is built on itself, at this point. It has successfully created a feedback loop wherein the coolest basketball players wear Jordans, so next year’s coolest basketball players feel the need to also wear Jordans.² The LeBrons and Kobes of the world build their own mini-fiefdoms inside the Nike brand, but Jordan has Melo, DWade, CP3, and a bevy of other basketball, WNBA, baseball, football, and sundry athletes.³

2: There are exceptions, but the Derek Roses of the world wear Adidas because Adidas throws money at them to convince them to be those exceptions.)

3: Least explicable team Jordan athlete: Denny Hamlin, NASCAR driver extraordinaire!

Michael Jordan is playing a dangerous game with his brand. In a move that is less than surprising, he is at the front of the hawkish team owner pack in the NBA lockout. It’s a move that is the opposite of what he said as a player, but fully in line with his deeper strategy, then and now, of win everything always. Coffee is for closers, rings are for winners. But he isn’t just negotiating against his own Jordan “team”, he’s one of the handful of guys actively trying to screw them. There has been noise about free agent players being less inclined to sign with the teams of hawkish owners. Money being equal, this may happen some, but there are enough factors in play that I doubt you’ll see much such politics. But shoe deals? What if Nick Young is the tip of the iceberg?⁴ If there’s serious NBAPA resentment of the deal that gets made, or especially if we lose a season, couldn’t Jordan’s gleeful seat driving that bus poison the well of the Jordan brand? Any player good enough to be on the Jordan “team” is plenty good to take his talents to Nike proper, or to another brand. Nike can live without Jordan just fine these days, but what would happen to new Air Jordans if the league wasn’t wearing them?

4: Nick Young's twitter background is perfect.

Michael Jordan the executive has aged into the enemy of his current avatars. He almost certainly has the cultural capital for his brand to ride out the lockout and emerge slightly dented at worst, but what if things go nuclear? If owners and the NBAPA go scorched earth, do you have any doubt he’s willing to burn any and all bridges with current stars if he thinks he’s right? The Jordan brand seems monolithic, ossified into our cultural firmament, but such things are always more fragile than we think. In the trickle-down world of sportswear, if the tip of the basketball pyramid abandons the Jordan brand, especially if it’s because he’s publicly an asshole, could that kill Air Jordan? The fire that fueled his narratively perfect career is now painting him as a villainous owner, indeed it is what guarantees he must be at their forefront. Even if the season isn’t lost, his stance is a blow to the unassailability of his brand. Republicans buy shoes too, but only NBA players wear them on television. If he pushes against them too hard, too many times, he could start to erode the sway his brand holds over them. His brand’s strength lies in its purity. If he muddies those waters as an owner, could he eventually destroy himself?

You Can't Outrun Yourself

"Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man."
— Jesuit motto

“I love him who desires the impossible.”
— Johann Wolfgang van Goethe, Faust

We are all, in our multifaceted fandoms, captives of our own childhoods. I don't mean that what we liked and disliked at a young age limits limits our appreciation, but rather that the lenses through which we evaluate everything never totally outrun the posters you had on your wall in elementary school and your first favorite player(s). If you grew up idolizing the Bash Brothers, you'll always dig the long ball. Joe Posnanski will always pull for the Duane Kuipers of the world.¹ The NBA is starting to get past finding Michael Jordan 2.0 because its youngest stars grew up with a league owned by AI, Shaq, Tim Duncan and Kobe. MJ was the crafty old guy on the Wizards, not the colossus standing astride the known world. Your sensibilities are molded by who you pretend to be in the backyard or driveway, who you first watch on television, and these days by who you play as on your PlayStation.

1: A large part of Posnanski's charm is that he pays as much attention to the losers as he does to the winners. I'm sure that's how he's wired anyway, but how perfect is it that he grew up in Cleveland?

I grew up in Cincinnati, so pro basketball never weighed heavily on my mind. My family was neutral in the UC/Xavier turf war that consumed the city's hoops consciousness, so I really only followed college hoops during March. I played in rec leagues and spent my fair share of time shooting at the rim behind our house, but there was never any player that burrowed into my consciousness. In baseball I was trying to be Barry Larkin, with a pinch of Chris Sabo because he wore glasses just like I did. I was never a big football fan, both because the violence of it didn't turn my crank and because the Bengals were so dreadful for most of my childhood that it was easier just to look away, and so I never played as a kid. What filled my mental void in basketball, it seems clear in retrospect, was the Harlem Globetrotters video game we had for our IBM 386.

This wasn't a good game. I poked around on the internet, trying to turn up a clip of gameplay or at least a screenshot, but the best I could find was this writeup from Golden Age of Games:

A very disappointing, sub-par basketball game based on the show basketball team Harlem Globetrotters. Well, even for 1990, I would say that this is a very poor simulation of the sport. Ugly graphics, hardly any sound, simple and boring gameplay. Just compare it with other basketball games of that time like TV Sports Basketball from Cinemaware. But what would you expect from Softie? Even EA’s 1986 One on One is more fun to play than this one. Blocky graphics, bad controls, and downright stupid gameplay with no ball physics whatsoever. Stay far from this Real Dog if you can, unless you somehow must play every single basketball game ever made.

Yikes. I haven't played this game since 1990 or so, but that seems about right. Players were pixelated and undifferentiated. Getting them to do what you wanted was at best a crapshoot, especially if you were seven like I was. It was in no way, shape or form well-made. It was terrible. But its trick shots stuck with me. For a seven year-old who didn't really watch the sport on tv, basketball was a sport of jammed fingers and clumped action. But on the computer, you could shoot three pointers, ride on your teammate's shoulders en route to an easy dunk² or shoot that sassiest of shots, the bounce shot.

2: If this were legal, Dwight Howard and Jameer Nelson would be kind of unstoppable, wouldn't they? At least with Yao Ming out indefinitely, I can't think of another big man who would be that good at playing NBA chickenfight. Of course, if this were legal, it would lead to the occasional truly horrific hard foul...

As I got older, longer-distance shooting became a reasonable option. Riding your teammate, sadly, is not and will never be legal. But the bounce shot is a thoroughly possible thing, limited only by its total uselessness. In a game, a bounce shot would be even more blockable than a granny shot. There's no way you could possibly get one off through even a mediocre defense. But that shot burrowed its way into my brain. I'll still try it if I play you in H.O.R.S.E. To me, it's the basketball version of a bird of paradise: it's too fragile and delicate to live in our world, but it makes me happy just to know that it's out there, somewhere.

You can probably guess where this is headed. Just one bounce highlight will send my heart aflutter, but there have been two different moments in the past month! To be a bounce basket enthusiast is to live the life of the camel, with long dry spells sandwiching blinding moments of joy, so this is truly an embarassment of riches.

First:



Al-Farouq Aminu didn't plan to bounce shoot the ball, but when a bruiser like Kyle Lowry knocks you around, you have to roll with it. The basket didn't count in the game, but it did in my heart.

Second:



Obviously, an alley-oop is not a long-distance shot. John Wall only had to get it in the rim's zip code and the dunk monster they call Blake Griffin would take care of the rest. But who cares? He used a long-distance bounce to get his points, go-between be damned. It's as close to reasonable as the shot will ever get, and that's more than enough for me.

The bounce shot is stupid and useless. No player at any level could try it without getting yelled at by his or her coach, and rightfully so. But that's why I love it. It's foolish, it's strategically bankrupt, and I will love it forever for exactly those reasons. Sensible choices lean on logic, unreasonable ones love.

No One Man Should Have All That Power

“It is so much simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose of dreams.”
—Don DeLillo

So LeBron opened his mouth about contraction. I assume this was at least semi-prompted by a reporter, but I don't think that is much of an excuse. I'm on record as not having a problem with his free agency machinations, but this is taking things a bit too far.

"Hopefully the league can figure out one way where it can go back to the '80s where you had three or four All-Stars, three or four superstars, three or four Hall of Famers on the same team," James said. "The league was great. It wasn't as watered down as it is [now]."

Say what? I'm not going to spend the time on Basketball Reference to really break it down, but that's nonsense. Sure, there are seven more teams in the league than there were in the 80s, but how much is that offset by David Stern's global reach? I have to go wrap my presents in a minute so I'm not going to find the exact demographics, but you have to figure that the Manus, Yao Mings and Dirk Nowitzki's make up for a good portion of that "watering down". The talent pool the league skims the top of may not be large enough to field thirty teams as strong as those twenty-three, but if not it can't be off by much.

Beyond that, though, LeBron is just making things up about the 80s. It's hard to fault a guy who was born in 1984 for having his history wrong, but if he isn't going to do the research he should probably avoid making concrete statements that are so blatantly self-serving. The media narrative about 80s ball being teams not stars is predicated on the only three teams that won titles that decade playing a strong team game. Bird and Magic shared like few other superstars ever have¹ and the Bad Boy Pistons' ringleader was the prototypical star point guard. That league had its share of stinkers too. It's hard to argue that a decade where only three teams won the title was had a better competitive mix than today, when five teams have won over the past ten years.

1: I am legally obliged to point out here that LeBron has the least selfish game of any superstar wing since those two dudes, but you knew that.

LeBron has every right to be wrong, I suppose. The real reason this puts my hackles up is that he's telling thirty guys that they should be fired. I get why he wants to hearken back to a mythical time when every team had "three or four superstars"² because then he wouldn't take so much flack. But this sort of talk undercuts the players' union in a really shitty way. If he disagrees with them philosophically I'm all for him airing that tactfully, but he's directly saying that the NBA would be a better place if the six worst players at each position didn't have jobs. Maybe he thinks that's true, but if I were his union rep I'd be screaming at him. Those thirty guys don't affect the money in his pocket, so why is he trying to take theirs? If you're going to buck the union this hard, you damn well better be able to back it up with facts, which he doesn't come close to doing. I can see a legitimate case being made for contraction, but this doesn't come close. Merry Christmas, scrubs, LeBron's made up history obviates the need for your jobs! Enjoy the D League and Europe!

2: Of course, if every team had three or four superstars, we would all mentally recalibrate our superstar threshold, because in a world with sixty basketball superstars superstardom would be meaningless.

Palate Cleansing!



It would be unseemly to throw up an unmitigated negative post in the midst of our staunchly non-denominational (wink wink!) holiday season! To make up for that, here are a few presents from those of use here at the No Fours central office.

To start, the two most wonderful non-dunks of the past week.



Hedo, that's a pretty bad way to start the conversation.




Andray Blatche has the power to let power go!


Finally, everyone's favorite Tom Waits Christmas non-carol. Happy holidays one and all, merry Christmas, happy belated Hanukkah, and a joyous Kwanzaa to every one of you!

Like an Upside Down Wrecking Ball

"[...]Daidalos made wings for himself and his son, and told his son not to fly too high when he was aloft, or else the glue would be melted by the sun and the wings would fall apart, and not to fly near the sea, or else the wings would fall apart from the moisture. But Icaros, lost in delight, paid no attention to his father's instructions and went ever higher." From Library, Pseudo-Apollodorus

Intentional Fallacies

There has been a lot of brouhaha in the NBA media and online world about KG’s “cancer” trash-talking to Charlie Villanueva, some of it insightful and interesting and some of it not. Jay Kaspian King posted a take at FreeDarko of the event as illustrative of what’s wrong with KG that has gotten under my skin, and I’ve been trying to figure out just what about it I react to so violently.

He starts the piece out musing about the Giants recent World Series victory as affirmation of the social transcendence sports occasionally offers, but then contrasts that to his Red Sox fandom. He moves from watching the 2004 World Series to his disaffection with the 2007 Sox and discovery of liberated fandom, of viewing sports as existing in an “aesthetic realm, where players exist as performers”.¹

1: I love me some FreeDarko, but I’ve never been able to get on board fully with liberated fandom. I take some umbrage at the term, at the implication that my loyalty to my favorite teams is some kind of cage I need to escape to fully appreciate other players. I’ve never felt a conflict between the knot in my stomach as the clock ticks down on a Celtics overtime game and the elation I feel when Chris Paul solves the geometry of the halfcourt set in a way I never would have imagined. They are very different things, but both are essential to what I love in sport. Both are part of what Angell calls the “business of caring” that grounds my love of sport.² I have no problem with the FD idea that you should care about players, not teams, but that decision has always seemed to me like a false dichotomy that would rob me of a lot of the pleasures of my fandom.] But I think his take on this realm is flawed. He’s right that there’s an unspoken line athletes get crucified when they cross, but it’s not when they “remind us that the scope of their lives is larger than ours.” If that were it, things like the DRose Fast Don’t Lie commercial would infuriate the public, not sell shoes. The line is that athletes can’t let us know that their investment in the game is different from ours. Fans, collectively, care about their teams with a nigh-religious sort of fervor. Athletes care about the game and winning, but that’s on a personal level. The team itself is their employer. Maybe one they love, maybe one they hate, but their relationship there can never be the same as the fan’s purely emotional one. LeBron James infuriated the sports media/public not because he called an unseemly amount of attention to a change in employers, but because he did so in a way that callously disregarded the emotions of Cavs fans. We don’t want LeBron to act like switching teams is like us switching employers, we want him to take our feelings into account, to gracefully account for the fans whose lives he is affecting. I don’t really care if a player is the “sort of guy…we can have a beer with”, and I don’t think most other fans really do either, we care if a player acts in a way that disrupts our fandom.

2: King partially dismisses that Angell quotation in his piece, which I find funny precisely because Angell’s point is that his love is sentimental, but that doesn’t make it ridiculous, exactly the linkage King casually makes. Here’s the whole thing:

“What I do know is that this belonging and caring is what our games are all about; this is what we come for. It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look—I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring—caring deeply and passionately, really caring—which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naïveté—the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball—seems a small price to pay for such a gift.”

But on to KG.

“With Garnett, there’s always a sense of insecure theater, of a man who hasn’t quite convinced himself of the virtues and authenticity of his passions.”

This is the polar opposite of how I read the man’s excesses. To me, it has always seemed like the fire that burns within Kevin Garnett, the intensity that fuels him to be the defensive force he is comes with this. His intensity and buy-in transformed Paul Pierce and Ray Allen into 40% of one of the best defensive NBA teams ever. I’ve never seen him play with anything but full effort, and to maintain that kind of drive all of the time would seem to me to necessitate walking the thin line between zealot and lunatic. If you find that distasteful, fine, but even his oddest moments, the barking like a dog, the clapping in a guard’s face, seem to be born of an inability to escape the outer reaches of a genuine drive, not some sort of performative enactment of a role he thinks he should be playing. I’ll gladly concede that other interpretations here are totally valid, but that specific and damning a reading of the man’s actions to me demands some sort of proof. King seems to think that the lack of “Isiah’s grim determination…Rodman’s ‘fuck it, we’re winning’ mentality” is some sort of fundamental flaw, that his lack of Jordan’s “impenetrability of the mask” or Kobe’s “visible intelligence” (what?) is what’s wrong with him. But those are all projections, rather than character traits. King reads KG as a bully, while Jordan, who is universally acknowledged as a huge bully gets off the hook because he was “impenetrable”? If we’re talking presentation, maybe, but King is trying to make a more sweeping claim than that.

Rewatch that John Thompson interview. That has always seemed to me to the at the core of Garnett's appeal. Sure he's crazy and does weird things sometimes. But look at that interview. Thompson wants to talk about the numbers KG is putting up, but KG won't let him. He's unwilling to talk about individual success in the face of team failure. Commenter Ben calls the interview a man "grappling with the deconstruction of his identity" as a winner. That rings far truer to me than King's dismissal of it as "Jimmy Swaggert style...wild theatrics". If he's putting on a show, wouldn't he want the cameras to stay on? It's a plausible explanation, I suppose, but requires a fundamental mistrust of Garnett above and beyond the grain of salt all such interviews need to be taken with.

“And while I’m not so naïve as to say that Garnett’s comments marked some unbreached depth of trash-talking, I don’t find it instructive or even interesting, really, to argue whether or not this is in or out of character for him, specifically, or for NBA players, at large.”

“The moment Garnett was traded to the Celtics, he ruined yet another one of my childhood teams.”

“Any rational fan, really, anyone who doesn’t salivate at the thought of jumping strangers, should feel their stomach turn whenever they watch one of these encounters.”

Listen, I’m as interested as anyone in plumbing the performative aspects of professional sports. The idea of persona is fascinating to me, the construction of identity in the press and through televised action, but the risk is mistaking your reading of someone’s persona as indicative of who they are as a person. King throws away any notions of contextualizing trash-talking in that first quote, and then gleefully blurs the line between persona and person in what reads as a very personal takedown trying to tell me how to think about Kevin Garnett. I have no idea what gets said on the court at NBA games, but it’s hard to evaluate the “cancer patient” line without context. If Villanueva is tweeting it it clearly got under his skin, but that doesn’t mean it’s head-and-shoulders worse than what other players are doing. Maybe it is, but the fact that other players aren’t jumping on KG seems to imply to me that it’s at least within the ballpark.

Nobody is obligated to like Kevin Garnett. There doesn’t even have to be a reason for the dislike. I certainly have players who I don’t like for no reason I can identify, and there are plenty whose demeanor puts me off. But that doesn’t mean I get to run around saying they’re bad people.

“Why can’t we call an asshole an asshole every time he acts like an asshole?”

Because being an asshole is context-dependent. If KG brought his act to a pick-up game near me, he’d be the biggest dick around. But he’s paid millions of dollars to win, not to make friends, and getting into opponents' heads is part of that. If Michael Jordan played in your rec league, you wouldn’t want anything to do with him. But he brought his pathological competitiveness to the NBA, where it was appropriate. Garnett had the misfortune of being a dick to someone with a twitter account, but don’t mistake that for making him qualitatively different from the other shit-talkers who came before and after him. If you can prove he is, cool, go for it, but that’s the thing, you have to prove it.

"What the fuck do we owe Kevin Garnett?"

You owe the man a fair assessment. You can think he's a dick, you can think his act is a show, but if you're going to call him out on it, you have to show me something to back it up. You have to show me some proof that he's different from those around him and that his earnestness is a put-on. Otherwise, I’m sorry you dislike him enough that he ended your fandom of the Celtics, but please don’t couch yourself in liberated fandom so you can throw stones at a picture of who he is that you painted. Attacking strawmen makes you the asshole.

Here and There

Welcome to October, everyone. Baseball's gearing up for the postseason (or eulogizing an ending season), the NFL's getting up to speed and training camp reports are whetting our whistles for what's to come. It's an embarassment of riches, friends. To keep you company over the weekend, the new issue of Norman Einstein's is out today. Among the other worthy articles, two have some No Fours fingerprints on them:

• An examination of what, exactly, everyone got so upset about when LeBron and Chris Bosh joined Dwayne Wade in South Beach, Freedom and Agency.
  
  
• A roundtable discussion of Ken Burns's recent Tenth Inning documentary.
  

Enjoy, and get ready for the MLB postseason. As long as the Yankees don't win the Series, it should be a great time.

Where Amazing Gets Analyzed

"The method, however, cannot be separated from the content. Benjamin's ideal of knowledge did not stop at the reproduction of what already is. He mistrusted all limitations placed on the realm of possible knowledge, the pride of modern philosophy in its illusionless maturity, for in it he sensed a plot to sabotage the claim of happiness, the attempt to strengthen a situation which tolerates only what is more of the interminable same; he sensed the presence of myth itself."
- Theodor Adorno, "A Portrait of Walter Benjamin" taken from Prisms, pg. 239

This gets, only a little bit obliquely, at why the Phoenix Suns are still my number one non-Celtics pick to win the NBA Finals this year, unless, say, Brandon Jennings one-(or two-, or three-)ups 2001 A.I. and single-handedly lures LeBron to Milwaukee¹.

I think I ought to take a brief detour here and make explicit something that has been nagging at most No Fours posts so far: sports is not art; however, sports and art are bifurcating expressions of the exact same human impulse. Call it applied aesthetic immanence-- the difference² is that sports is self-actualized through the formalized praxis of competition, which is basically a fancy way of saying that sports, unlike art and like say, science, is systematic, accountable. Whereas artistic legitimacy is a total fucking philosophical morass, depending on idiosyncratic, culturally mediated combinations of intellectual contemplation and inarticulate, gut-level reactions, sports legitimacy is a product of winning. If you dig deep enough, of course, a certain amount of arbitrariness and contingency are inherent in this formalization; but a) I'm totally willing to forgive this on the basis of all the totally wonderful narrative and tribalistic side-effects thereof³ and b) this has nothing to do with the fact that the aesthetic moment underlying a whole lot of the experience of sports fandom and art is one and the same. Anyway, the reason I feel impelled to bang on about this here is to sort of explain why I think quoting postmodern dialecticians is bully for sports analysis.

1: If he pulls this off, you might want to steer clear of Milwaukee for a while, because that would be some Tetsuo meets Akira shit.

2: This is also why the Burmese sport of Chinlone is so gobsmackingly wonderful conceptually even though it's just glorified hackie-sack. It doesn't synthesize art and sports, it totally dissolves the partitioning, leaving no difference for synthesis to bridge. Or rather, being subject to different cultural mediation, it shows just how semantic the opposition of the two really is.
3: Epiphenomenal swag^a!

a: Sorry, guys.

But back to the Germans and the Suns. This is ultimately an attempt to parse my personal NBA fandom, not to rehash the highfalutin' defense of sports as conceptual edifice, and this is where shit gets complicated. Because historically, the ideological reverse (or obverse, depending on your perspective) of the Run-And-Gun Suns here is pretty clearly the Spurs (for "illusionless maturity" read "defense wins championships"), and, as pointed out by 48 Minutes of Hell recently, the current Celtics are in many ways the spiritual heirs of the Tim Duncan Spurs (I'm writing this in a flat with no viable internet connection, so I can't pull relevant quotes). These two impulses, liberated fandom and let's call it captive fandom⁴, are inescapably contradictory. Which leads us, natch, back to Adorno (this from the parsing of a philosophical disjoint between two French dudes' notions of museums re: art and its vitality, so we're getting a bit more metaphorical here):

"In the litigation implicitly pending between them, neither Proust nor Valéry is right, nor could a middle-of-the-road reconciliation be arranged. The conflict between them points up in a most penetrating way a conflict in the matter itself, and each takes the part of one moment in the truth which lies in the unfolding of contradiction. The fetishism of the object and the subject's infatuation with itself find their correctives in each other. Each position passes over into the other. Valéry becomes aware of the intrinsic being of the work through unremitting self-reflection, and, inversely, Proust's subjectivism looks to art for the ideal, the salvation of the living."
- Theodor Adorno, "Valéry Proust Museum" taken from Prisms, pg. 183

So I guess what I'm saying here is that I think I can have my cake and eat it too. Unless they meet in the Finals, in which case I hope Steve Nash makes some really pretty passes en route to getting lit up for a triple-double average by Rondo.

4: "Captive fandom" is cute, but if someone has a formulation that actually gets at the meaning of hitching your apple wagon to the home team's star, please holler at the comments.