Another Lap With "Senna"

This is somewhere between an extension and a counterpoint to Rough Justice's semireview yesterday. We might as well get the counterpoints out of the way first-- it won't take too long because I basically agree with RJ. My points of difference have largely to do with the implicit politics of the film: I'm not quite comfortable imputing the disdain for Prost or the out-and-out beatification of Senna. Don't get me wrong, it was certainly hagiographic, and uninterested in interrogating the man's self-presentation. Senna speaks for himself in the interviews that comprise the fabric of the film. That is certainly a political choice, but such a light editorial touch gives the audience latitude in forming their own judgements. The film's sins of omission are almost entirely explainable through its narrow focus on the life of Senna the driver rather than Senna the man. Prost comes off as an antagonist because that is the role he played in Senna's career, and many of his achievements, including his first two championships, happened when Senna was a young driver without a competitive car. Only almost, mind you.

The reason this is a post instead of a conversation is because of the rivalry between Prost and Senna. It was a rivalry of classical form and bitter intensity and it was the centerpiece of the film. The two became teammates on McLaren in 1988, and from the first season, the two found themselves at odds. They were very possibly the best two drivers alive at the time, and McLaren had the fastest car.¹ They were each other's truest peer, and each had far too much ego and competitiveness to subordinate. They also embodied a stylistic contrast that is very easy to lend moral weight: Prost was nicknamed "The Professor" for his methodical, intellectual style and was happy to finish 5th if it would serve his needs in the season's points tally; Senna was brash and intuitive behind the wheel and drove every race for first; Prost played the political games of F1 as well as anyone and was close with FISA president Jean-Marie Balestre; Senna was willfully ignorant of the games behind the game. They mirrored each other historically as well as personally in a pair of deeply controversial crashes in successive Japanese Grands Prix. Their mutual hatred and respect formed a deep bond between them; I think Prost would have done anything to save Senna's life for the same reasons Batman saved the Joker.²

1: Between Prost and Senna, Team McLaren won 15 of 16 races that season.
2: And vice versa, these being comic books.

With its complex subject, epic rivalry, and stunning racing footage, "Senna" is one of the most beautiful and compelling sports documentaries I've ever seen, a fantastic choice for ESPN films to follow the 30 for 30 series, and for what it's worth a full-throated recommendation from the No Fours crew. Keep an eye out for it, in the theater if possible.

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.

Aesthetics And/Or Justice

"I fear indeed that we shall never rid ourselves of God, since we still believe in grammar." -Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols

"The first umpire said, 'There's balls and there's strikes, and I calls 'em like they is.'
The second umpire said, 'Well, I think it's a bit more complicated than that. There's balls and there's strikes, and I calls 'em as I sees 'em.'
The third umpire smiled. 'Well, there's balls. And there's strikes. But they ain't nothing until I calls 'em.'" -Allegorical

In a recent post, The Run of Play's Brian Phillips discusses the structural role of blown calls. His defense of bad calls is beautiful: whereas if a sport's¹ meaning exists in terms of its skeleton of rules, any flaw in enforcement necessarily undermines the sport, "[i]f soccer is a story... the narrative can take in anything and... its aesthetic greatness doesn’t depend on the sympathy between actions and the rules. You wouldn’t stop Macbeth from killing the king, because then you wouldn’t have Macbeth."

1: Run of Play is going steady with soccer, but the issues at hand are obviously more universal. I'm not gonna bother mangling quotes in the name of semantic consistency or avoid relevant non-soccer examples.

The post's paradigmatic example is Maradona's Hand of God goal. In Phillips' exegesis, "the Hand of God was too great and all-comprehending a moment for the rules to have created it: it was a total summation—of Maradona’s character, of the nature of that rivalry, of everything on up to the international climate in the years after Falklands War and arguably the entire 1980s—that couldn’t possibly have existed if it weren’t at a slant to the rules. Lose that and you’re left with a fair, pure, antiseptic match that fulfills the ideal of the sport but sacrifices almost all its truest and deepest significance."

But that presupposes that narrative power is somehow endemic to the moment; or that it occurs in a vacuum; or that, depending on circumstances, it happens or it doesn't. Narrative is constructed retrospectively, though, making that counter-factual sort of glib. Had the Hand of God been called in strict, omniscient compliance with the rules, you're left with an intensely competitive World Cup quarter final featuring "The Goal of the Century", charged with all the baggage of the Faulklands War and ending regulation in a 1-1 tie. Fair, sure. But pure and antiseptic? The hypothetical match might not match the historical match's depth of significance, but there would be no sacrifice, no lack of truth: it would be a different game, signifying differently. But the point remains that la mano de Dios did happen, and it was a pure, searing Moment that transcended its match and struck hard at some supposed locus of truth and justice.


So we're left with the moment as it really happened, to interpret how we will. Analyzing this choice, Phillips offers up a dichotomy that I can't quite get behind. On one hand, there is "the game", a stern, legalistic endeavor seeking only to operate within its parameters. On the other is "the story", casting wide its net without judgement so much as interpretation. For one, there is no good and bad; for the other, no right and wrong². But that formulation both limits the aesthetic possibilities of sports and ignores the very real link between game and story. To my mind, the proper analogy is the relationship between grammar and literature. Language, like sport, is a consummately human realm, with its formal rules and suggestions and exceptions, susceptible of a whole slew of teleological and aesthetic significances. There is value in both Wittgenstein and Gertrude Stein. And just like in sports, the rules and the beauty of language overlap imperfectly.

2: This is, of course, a huge oversimplification, and just like in real life, something is lost when you boil things down this much. Demi-glace this ain't.

A bigger problem is how Phillips tries to reconcile his ideal of soccer's philosophical acceptance of bad calls with the governance of the sport, what he calls the "'game as a story/save the Hand of God' line... as an argument for design". He fully recognizes that premeditated bad calls are a hopeless cause, but totally misses why: "There’s no doubt that a certain amount of bad refereeing enhances the narrative of the game, but that isn’t FIFA’s angle, and in any case giving match officials a certain quota of blown calls to reach would just trade epic accidents for bureaucratic stupidities. The Hand of God wouldn’t mean anything if it had resulted from discretionary refereeing choice built into the rules of the game, because you can’t program spontaneous mysticism."


What's really missing here is the recognition that a blown call is not merely an error or an aberration, it is a failure. To ignore that is to reduce the referees to automatons, to deny them their dignity, agency, and yes, their narrative and tragic power. The NBA has reached the point where referees have name recognition and individual reputations³ for fairness, bias, or incompetence. This is fine grist for the narratively-inclined, but the uncertain ground from which it springs doesn't simply reduce out. It's a necessary part of the game as it is played, by athletes and referees alike, because the parameters are fluid. There is a long history of diegetic whistle-swallowing⁴ in basketball, especially come playoff time. Fundamentally, refereeing is a human endeavor, fluid and rife with contingency.

3: In more concrete analysis, there's some fascinating work going on collecting referee stats.
4: To say nothing of "star calls". Really, let's say nothing about them.

So to say "human error is part of the game" is a lame excuse only holds water if you reduce the game to its rules or reduce the referees to an abstraction. Phillips claims, "The wider the circle within which you’re willing to see the game as aesthetic, in other words, the more you wind up relying on chance and accident," but I don't think that's it at all; the wider the circle within which you're willing to see the game as aesthetic, the more you wind up relying on people.

For Now We See Through A Glass, Darkly

"The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again. ‘The truth will not run away from us’: in the historical outlook of historicism these words of Gottfried Keller mark the exact point where historical materialism cuts through historicism. For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably. (The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.)" -Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History

"I am prepared for anything: KG pulling a Willis Reed, Jordan and Bird showing up, Rondo hitting John Salmons with a chair, Doc running the series-deciding play for Tony Allen, Kevin Harlan's head flying off his body, Tim Thomas experiencing a human emotion, you name it. That's the best thing about this series: Anything is possible. The ceiling hasn't just been removed, it's been obliterated.
Call it Game 7, call it Round 15, call it whatever you want. Just remember to call it the greatest first-round series ever played." -Bill Simmons, Chicago Bulls Boston Celtics Game 6 Diary

Sail To The Moon (Brush The Cobwebs Of The Sky)

There are sports events and there are sports Events. Transcendent moments for which "'we put up with every story about Clemens and Bonds and Michael Vick and Terrell Owens and everyone else who conspires to make sports less fun,"¹ moments that form the frameworks of our fandom. As a cursory poke about our archives will tell you, one of the main reasons we feel sports in general is worth our emotional and intellectual engagement is that it provides "a bottomless well of compelling narrative."² I'm going to go a step further here: I'll go ahead and posit that as far as our individual fandoms are concerned, sports events derive lasting significance almost exclusively from their narrative significance.³ This works on all sorts of scales. We use evolving mental narratives on various levels to define athletes, franchises, even entire sports. There are events and Events; there are transcendent moments and there are Transcendent Moments. I feel a hastily conceived, extremely biased chart coming.

1: Same Simmons piece. It is, I must say, enormously convenient to have such an invested, articulate Celtics fan around to quote, so long as he's not making "Godfather" references or talking about women.
2: While I have a few differences with Justice on the subject, they're more emphatic than thematic. Read his post, read the Run of Play series linked therein, we'll all high five, it'll be great.
3: This isn't incompatible with the other things Justice was on about earlier. It's different in the same way spending a whole season flipping on ESPN when you're channel surfing is different from spending a whole season flipping on ESPN when your team is on.

Karma Police

All of this mythologizing is an internal, personal process, but it's hardly unique and it doesn't happen in a vacuum. From the staid, journalistic AP recaps to deeply partisan hometown newspaper columns, there is a structure to the unfolding media discussions. A sort of teleological progression towards an interpretive narrative that grows more abstract and orthodox in proportion to the narrative power of its subject.⁴ Now, to a great extent this is just humanity doing its thing-- finding, applying, and adjusting broad patterns is one of the primary ways our brains interact with the world. But every so often it is good to be reminded that sports is "a business where developing, maintaining, defending, attacking, and manipulating broad narratives [is] an important tool of the trade." Controlling the story is vital; most teams would like to land the next David Axelrod almost as much as they'd like to land the next LeBron James, I'd imagine. But on the level of the individual fan, what this boils down to is that, unless you avoid journalism like the plague and only talk sports with a bloody-minded, manifesto-toting group of friends, discussions that deeply influence the narratives you will internalize are largely framed for you in broadcast media studios.

4: If this seems like a stretch, tell me: does anyone ever bother trying to claim that this was a low-percentage shot leading to a somewhat flukey win? Because it was.

Motion Picture Soundtrack

I became intensely aware of this process trying to follow the Celtics' postseason from New Zealand. Between the massive time zone difference and the NBA's peripheral status to a people in rugby's thrall, I was totally relegated to playing catch-up on the internet. YouTube highlights, recaps upon recaps, and a handful of blogs read religiously left me with all sorts of predigested data about the games: who got what statistics in how many minutes, what the key plays were and what they looked like, which coaching moves could be dissected and how, every bench player's contribution and so forth. But the aesthetic experience of watching a game of basketball was utterly stripped away. It was like being led around blindfolded instead of going for a walk. It was like reading Cliffs Notes. My rooting took on an edge of desperation-- if we could only advance far enough, ESPN Australia would have to televise all our games. As the first round series gathered steam, poring over the gobsmacked ebullience pouring out of damn near every corner of the internet dedicated to NBA ball became downright excruciating. Derek Rose matches Kareem's playoff debut scoring record while posting the second 35-x-10 postseason line in history and icing the winning freethrows in overtime. Meanwhile Rajon Rondo, a developing star in his own right and my favorite player to watch, holds his own in the point guard duel, going 29-9-7, and an exhausted Pierce comes up just shy of bringing home the bacon. And that was just game one. Then there were six overtimes in a three-game stretch. Game five happened:

And so did Game Fucking Six:
⁵

And acres of text flowed forth.

5: I chose this picture over Noah roaring like the ugliest lion for the same reason Time magazine chose Giuliani over Bin Laden as 2001's Man of the Year. Ray Allen was the FDNY.

How To Disappear Completely

Basketball moved on. The Celts put up another gutsy seven-game series, but couldn't put the hammer down on Orlando and went to their respective summer homes disappointed. And basketball moved on. Once the dust had settled, what was just as striking as the ecstatic tenor of the round one coverage was how there was no place in any of the sundry postseason retrospectives for "the greatest series you've ever seen in your entire life". Once the games are all over, well, the game changes. The serious fans know the score and have gone home. The only demographics paying attention are Lakers fans looking to wallow some in victory and The Casual Fan, a much easier creature to predict than, say, The Reader. The order of the day isn't really retrospection, it's hagiography. And so the Lakers' hiccup against the Rockets, while it was never compared to the handful of greatest series the Association has ever seen, was the early-round series of note, because it was vindicated by what came later. Past is prologue, and the Celtics-Bulls got left hanging, waiting for its book.

"Vindicated by what came later" also happens to mark the exact point where analysis starts turning into total speculation, which is kind of fun or sort of worthless, depending on how you choose to look at it. If The LeBrons' backcourt hadn't disappeared and they had pulled out some more games (and hell, if we're spotting Playoff Lyndon B. James some teammates playing well, we might as well just give them the title, too), how much more vital would this shot have been? If Bird and Magic had both pulled J.J. Reddicks, would the 1979 NCAA championships have transformed anything?

But let's go another direction with this idea that, recontextualized by what follows, events can change significance. The question at hand is not "what if?" but "what next?"

Jigsaw Falling Into Place

To second-guess the past is one thing; to second-guess the future quite another. There are simply too many variables at play. The core of this team could win anywhere from zero to two more titles⁶, and each scenario would cast things in a different light. Maybe it bypasses the franchise level altogether and becomes a touchstone in some players' creation myths. How bright can Rondo shine? How high can Rose rise, and how long will it take him to put it all together? Can Ray Allen pull out a few more big performances and officially pass Reggie Miller in the jumpshot pantheon?

I can't even pretend to guess with any vestige of authority, which, really, is sort of the point. Nothing kills a good story quite like predictability, after all. Simply pointing out the unknowability of the future is both obvious and played out, but beyond the next few times the Bulls and Celts meet up, who knows when and how this series will find relevance? All we can do is wait and see how things work out.

6: If we do manage to pull out two more, could Kobe deal with an asterisk the size of KG's knee next to His Championship?