Reflections On Basketball And Why I Can't Stand It Anymore

When I was a child I used to love basketball. I'd play it all day, I watched it every weekend, it competed with baseball for my affections. Now, all these years later, football is my passion, baseball is a distant second, and basketball isn't even a blip on my radar. With baseball it's easy to explain why I lost interest: the 1994 strike. You just don't cancel the World Series. That was the first, though not the last, loss of a postseason in a major North American sport. After that I decided to boycott the greedy bastards, and when I made it a whole year without watching so much as a single game I didn't look back. It didn't help that my once beloved Pirates embarked on setting the all-time record for futility, only broken last year. But basketball was different, and I walked away from it completely. I've asked myself why for a while, and I guess now is as good a time as any to work through why that might be.

The accusation is usually that I have some latent racism, that basketball is primarily an urban sport played by black people and therefore it's because I don't like black people that I don't watch anymore. Back in the 1980s I was a Boston Celtics fan, largely because of my uncle, and the great players on that team were Larry Bird and Kevin McHale, indeed white men, but also Robert Parish and Dennis Johnson, very definitely black men. I was excited for 24 hours like everybody else when Len Bias was drafted, only to have it all come crashing down thanks to cocaine and cardiac arrhythmia. Even so, I couldn't get enough of Michael Jordan, and though I despised the Lakers like any proper Celtics fan I still admired Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, James Worthy, and Magic Johnson. There was also Hakeem Olajuwon, Moses Malone, Karl Malone, etc. The list is endless. All were great, all remain great. I can still watch pre-1995 basketball and enjoy it.

But you know, there may be something to that accusation, however small. My waning interest seems to coincide with the ascension of gangsta rap to the forefront of popular music. It seemed to me that the players started to turn into tattooed, gang-color wearing, jive talking caricatures of the players I grew up with. They all had entourages, they were always getting into trouble, and they were all intent on showing off instead of showing up. Everybody remembers Allen Iverson's famous "Practice?!" comment, right? Well, to me that was indicative of the me-first attitude that contrasted directly with the team concept I always played under. Then my idols, Magic with his philandering and contracting AIDS, Michael getting buried deep under gambling debts and quitting the game for two years to pathetically dabble in baseball, Reggie Lewis collapsing and dying... I was becoming disillusioned with it all.

I didn't get any better from there. There was the Pacers-Knicks series where there always seemed to be fights with Spike Lee spouting off from the sidelines, the Malice In The Palace, Javaris Crittenton and Gilbert Arenas with guns in the locker room (Crittenton is now facing murder charges), Chris Andersen (incidentally, a white man) turning into a disgusting tattooed freak having them up to his chin, LeBron and "The Decision"...

I may not be a political conservative anymore, but I am personally conservative. I am still very much the Catholic boy who grew up learning to be respectful and dignified, feeling shame when I failed to live up to the lessons that I was taught. It causes my wife no small amount of amusement. Everything I have mentioned to this point simply offends my sensibilities.

To be fair, all of these things happened in the past. No game is innocent of shady characters. Not even my beloved Steelers are immune, with Ben Roethlisberger's shady behavior, Hines Ward getting a DUI, and James Harrison hitting his wife. Weird that I don't hold them to a higher standard, isn't it? But to me basketball is a finesse game, a beautiful dance of five players working in concert to win games, whereas football is organized violence. It makes sense to me that football players would be goons. The guys in the trenches aren't exposed for everyone to see, you don't ever feel like you know them. Basketball players, however, are almost completely exposed, and with fewer of them any failure from one of them is an indictment of all of them. ESPN revels in their failures, reporting them with glee. Pundits on sports talk shows go on and on about everything. Invariably, though, with sports it always comes back to race when discussing the nature of the reporting. Not even journalism is immune to the accusation.

You can be sure that I don't dislike people because they are black. I wasn't raised that way, and I don't know that I am capable of it. But I don't like people acting like goons and criminals. In the end, though, I do have some biases. I would like to think that I can be fair, but it seems that I cannot be. Perhaps it's just a bridge too far.

I simply cannot tolerate basketball anymore, and that's my failure. It just isn't the game I remember. In the fullness of time, I might realize that it never was. Maybe then I can start again and enjoy the game for what it is, not what I wish it would be.