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?

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.

Theodicy and Saint Jeter

“When we explain action in terms of desires and beliefs we are not putting forward any explanatory theory to account for action. It is true that desires and beliefs explain action; but the explanation is not of any causal hypothetical form. It is not as if the actions of human beings constitute a set of raw data – actions identifiable on their faces as the kinds of actions they are – for which we may seek an explanatory hypothesis. On the contrary, many human actions are not identifiable as actions of a particular kind unless they are already seen and interpreted as proceeding from a particular set of desires and beliefs.”
— Anthony Kenny : Free Will and Responsibility

If you pay any attention at all to baseball, you must have heard the squawking the other day when Derek Jeter acted like a pitch that hit his bat hit his hand well enough to fool the home plate umpire. Joe Posnanski had a good take on it over at his blog. I agreed with a lot of what he said. "I save my deep admiration for people who choose fair play over a momentary advantage," in particular is a notion that resonates pretty deeply for me. Posnanski turns Jeter into a bit of a parable, as is sometimes his wont¹, but in doing so conflates Derek Jeter the man and Derek Jeter the media construct in a way that isn't really fair.

1: I think the reason Posnanski is way up on my current mental list of sportswriters is how he doesn't shy away from turning a yarn into a parable but does so in a way that sidesteps the pat pieties of the Rick Reillys of the world.

"I don't think what Jeter did was wrong, not at all, not in baseball terms. So what was my reaction? Well, I think what Jeter did was kind of ... sad. Has he become so impotent as a hitter -- do you realize the guy now has an 86 OPS+? -- that now he's willing to hop around and have trainers look at his forearm when the ball clearly did not hit him? That's what Derek Jeter has become? And then afterward, he's sheepishly defending the move by saying it's his job to get on base, well, is that what's behind the Derek Jeter aura? Is that what he has stood for all these years?"

Look at what he does there. He's making two points here about how Derek Jeter let him/us down. The first is that Jeter, who is having a pretty bad year and looking more mortal than he ever has before, has now crossed over the line between young and great and old and hanging on, and that's why he did what he did. This may be true, but for that to be the case we'd need to know what's going on inside Jeter's head, or at least that he wouldn't have tried this earlier in his career. Neither is knowable, it seems to me. I agree that playacting is a cheap move, but I don't know how we can claim with any certainty that this is something that he wouldn't have tried a decade ago.

But fine, some license here isn't a huge deal. It's undeniable that Jeter is in his decline, and he needs every break in a way he never has before. I think the point Posnanski makes about aging and cheating is valid, just maybe not as applicable here as he thinks. But look at the second thing he does: "That's what Jeter has become...is that what's behind the Derek Jeter aura? Is that what he stood for all these years?" As a Red Sox fan, the media trope of Derek Jeter as all that is good and just in baseball has driven me crazy, at least partially because he's never really offered a chink in his armor². But what Posnanski does there is to subtly hold Jeter the man hostage to Jeter the media narrative.

2: Other than his crappy defense, of course, but now I'm just being petty.

There was a bit of an internet scuffle about how we should view Kevin Durant after the FIBA championships. By all reports, Durant is a kind, mature young man who lives and breathes basketball and is working hard to max out his talent. But that's the thing, "by all reports". Very few of us know the man at all, and the media we rely on to tell us about him only sees him in his professional context. The upshot was an interesting debate about whether it's fair or a good idea to hold Kevin Durant up as an ideal(ized) player³, and if to do so is simply setting him up to be turned on by the same media that would do the building up.

3: The tweets from Nate Jones are also very worth looking at, but hard to link to. You can find the links in the Bethlehem Shoals article I linked first up there.

I don't think Posnanski is trying to be unfair to Jeter here, but that doesn't mean he isn't. Derek Jeter never told us he was perfect. He certainly never gave us a Barkleyesque disavowal, but who is going to argue with media coverage presenting him or herself as representing truth, justice and apple pie? I'm sure he made a lot of money in his career by being the face of the Yankee Way, but it's a position to which he was voted by others, not one for which he volunteered. "Is that what he stood for all these years?" Maybe that's what Derek Jeter^TM stood for, but that's because the media decided he did. Faking his way into a HBP wasn't a betrayal of anything, it just serves as a warning not to trust the media when it holds anyone up as a symbol of capitalized values. Derek Jeter, like Kevin Durant, LeBron James and any other athlete you choose to look at, is a man, not a myth. We do the athletes and ourselves a disservice any time we lose sight of that fact.

The Trap of Perfection

Or: The Genius of Charles Barkley

Unless you live in a cave¹, you're at least passingly familiar with the Tiger Woods saga that has played out over the past week or two. I'm interested not at all in what exactly happened with Tiger, his wife and his possible mistress(es). I suppose I'm interested in how Woods's career plays out from here, but I don't see how that is at all knowable, making any prognostication pointless. What does interest me is how we got here.

1: Ah, that hoary old cliché. It's just a bit pithier than saying "Unless you live in a television and internet media-free bubble".

Fundamentally, human beings are only somewhat knowable to each other, even in intimate situations. At greater distance, you can hope for facets of someone at best. How well do you truly know your coworkers? Your casual friends? Celebrity extends this even further. For all that we live in a maelstrom of media coverage and rapidly disseminated information, how in-depth is any of it?

Public persona then, is a construct that overlaps with the reality of private identity at best imperfectly, and at worst not at all. Because there are vast sums of money at stake, the athletes who matter on a (inter)national scale have teams working to sell them to us. Tiger Woods^TM is carefully built, with the parts of the story that fit being finessed into the narrative arc as perfect as his golf swing, and everything else is left out entirely.² Done well, this is immensely profitable for everyone involved. The athlete gets lauded as a hero/role model, the company he³ is shilling for moves product, and the public gets an object for their affection. This is all well and good, but any cracks in the facade can spell trouble. Every elite athlete is a human first, foibles and all. For every Albert Pujols, who seems to be above reproach⁴, there are countless pros who fall short of the impossible ideal to which the best are held.

2: Charles P. Pierce has an excellent set of articles about Tiger Woods and this dichotomy, in addition to a nice one about Deion Sanders/Prime Time that are well worth your time.

3: Yes, there are certainly famous female athletes, but let's not pretend there's anything resembling gender parity here. For a variety of reasons, both sexist and physiological, the vast preponderance of famous athletes, especially w/r/t advertising money, are male. Just compare how many female athletes are featured in articles on ESPN.com and sports blogs compared to football cheerleaders.

4: And again, the operative word here is seems. I don't know Albert, he certainly could be an inveterate womanizer/drunk/gambler/general sleaze of a human. This comment is based purely on public reporting of acts that didn't appear to be calculated for public acclaim, but it's possible I've been duped by an exceedingly clever and subtle PR campaign.

In days of yore, public figures were actively protected. Beat writers traveled on the same trains as Babe Ruth. They played cards and drank together, so how could they write about the big guy's shortcomings? Think about how JFK's press corps actively safeguarded his public image. This is conjecture, but I would guess this symbiotic relationship, in which athletes images were actively burnished by writers who in turn got to write about folk heroes instead of flawed men, fell apart in the late 70s and early 80s. In baseball, several stars had very public struggles with cocaine. A large portion of the NBA had similar problems, which only compounded the fact that it was a largely black league covered by predominently white beat writers for a public discourse dominated by white audiences.⁵ At the same time, television contracts ballooned, and with them player contracts. Baseball had its first million-dollar player in 1979, which I assume was the first in any sport, though I could be wrong. (I can't dig it up on Google, so feel free to correct me here.) Stars' lifestyles drifted further from the average Joe's.

5: I don't know enough about the history of the NFL, NHL, golf or any other sport to compare their respective timelines here, but I have to imagine they all follow similar patterns.

Add in the ratcheting up of salaries over the next twoish decades and exponential acceleration the internet caused in media coverage, we find ourselves here. Instead of daily newspaper coverage of your local team and monthly articles in Sports Illustrated et al., you have all the varied blogs, ESPN plus the celebrity status of big stars like Tiger means that national non-sports media will run with a story like this. To really reel in the big bucks, conventional wisdom holds, you need to not only be a
The only way out, as far as I can tell, if you don't want to clamp down on access and try to rebuild⁷, is to emulate the genius of the Charles Barkley mold. I really don't know why another pro hasn't wrapped himself in the cloak of not being a role model. Any star who has a sufficiently public moral failing gets painted as a non-role model, but the usual response is mealy-mouthed pap about regret and living up to responsibilities in the future. Sir Charles was smart enough to realize that if he embraced not the specific failing, but rather his imperfection as a human, he could live his life the way he wanted and only have to avoid not totally trashing his image. Any future transgressions could be dismissed simply by saying "I told you I wasn't a role model." Far from ruining his endorsement prospects, look at where it got him. I can certainly understand that this is a counter-intuitive first step to take, but what I don't get is why at least one or two stars who would otherwise chafe under the mantle of perfect role model haven't tried the path of the antihero.

7: Note: this is exactly what I think Tiger Woods will do, largely successfully. It's not like he pulled a Michael Vick, he just got caught sleeping around, which I'm pretty sure something like 85% of all star professional athletes do, with some automotive bizarreness thrown in to juice up the story. If you'd rather think about what Tiger will do to rehabilitate his image, let me direct you to the always excellent Bethlehem Shoals.