Sports blogs, playoff basketball, and a renewed sense of purpose

By Emerald Gao
Written on May 1, 2007

I read the most fantastic blog entry in the history of forever tonight. A bit more on the contents later, but I feel like my current state of being needs to be at least partly contextualized in order for any of my words to make sense.

A1) I don't spare two thoughts about the NBA during the regular season. It's a tiresome churn of games that can be perfectly itemized by box scores and statistics. This is my own opinion, of course, and everybody who knows me knows how much I fetishize grass, turf, open air, voices rising or disappearing into the sky. I have my biases, and the NBA goes against them.

A2) Playoff basketball is when I go slightly nuts. I don't have a team, you see. Location-wise, it would be the Golden State Warriors, who sucked for so many years while I was still trying to follow the league in some sort of misguided daddy-love-me maneuver. But let's face it: for me, and a lot of kids in my generation, it was always all about MJ. It got hard to support a glory team in the off years, but it's even harder to swallow the words "I used to be a Bulls fan" now that they're seeing the first green shoots of success again. The point is, I find it easier to follow players I like. Which means the stars, the faces of the sport. Nowitzki, Duncan, Ginobili, Yao, Nash. (Surprisingly, most of my favorites are foreigners. What does this say about my viewing habits?) So yes, I buy into the hype when it comes to basketball. It's kind of disgusting, actually, but if nothing else, it's a good way to organize my tv schedule for the upcoming month.

B) I have a penchant for putting sports bloggers up on a pedestal. Perhaps because of my own ongoing experiment, chugging along but hampered by my inability to network and trim off the excess weight (read: ego), or perhaps because I simply enjoy (or am envious of) thought-provoking writing about a subject that, to a lot of people, don't require more thought outside of a few column inches in the newspaper every morning. See: KSK for shameless parody, Da Bears Blog for fanaticism at its most focused, and the newest addition to my blogroll, Free Darko.

Why am I reading a basketball blog? Well, because it's playoff time, and I'm neither knowledgeable enough about the league to wander around the internet undirected, nor am I trusting enough of mainstream media to give me something other than recycled material. So I turn to the fans. And this is where Free Darko comes in. More often than not, I find that if the writing is good, really good, it'll prove applicable to more sport than one. This is definitely the case with the column that I linked at the top of the post. A snippet:

Myth is more about tone than content, and with the modern age came the possibility of unsettled parables. The bearded Russian writers will never die only because they built convenience stores at these crossroads. I assume anyone reading this site has at least an outside interest in enshrining man's conflicts, and in carrying that over to the game of basketball. I probably fail as a fan exactly because I can't see sports as a return to innocence; I could care less about those moments when good/evil or right/wrong fall into sharp relief, when they paint a false picture of what it's like to be human in this century. This is a league of psychology, but it's also a league of relevance. No shit a dunk is escapist, the game-winner transcendent, and all that. Doesn't mean they have to become the framework for the whole--of sports, or of mankind.

This is perhaps the most eloquently worded expression of what it means to be a sports fan. Or what it should mean, at least. There's a lot of talk in the football community with regards to good vs evil, what side of the spectrum teams fall on, and which teams/managers hold up the good qualities of the sport vs which teams/managers demean it. It's a simple recitation that schoolchildren regurgitate every day of their lives: underdogs good, fascist thugs bad. Barcelona noble, Chelsea spoiled. And so on.

But at the end of the day, all footballers are footballers and all athletes are athletes, no matter what team they play for. Most of them are just doing their job the best they can, with whatever personal means they can muster. And supporters of universally hated teams are still human, they still live with the set of myths and the faith prescribed by the very act of being a fan. Strip away the media, the sponsors, and the spotlight, and the only things a team needs to represent are the expectations and the good faith of their supporters, after all. Whether their actions and words can be translated into some universal truth or Grand Statement of Importance is a function of our (society's) need to elevate them onto that pedestal.

Free Darko goes on to explain why he finds the Warriors more human than other teams, and does a really good job in that respect. They don't play glorious basketball; they are a ragtag bunch; they carry a certain aura of fatalism. They are, in accordance with the mythology of sports in general, underdogs. It's not only the sense that they've defied the odds so far against the Mavs that contributes to their characterization, but also in the realization of what it is exactly that they achieve on the court.

I don't have a good ending point; mostly I'm trying to convey how difficult it is to evaluate my own perception on sports viewership. So I'll end on two notes:

It's time to watch sports more carefully than I ever have in my life.

If only everybody viewed sports like this.

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