sam cassell is an alien and i love him

Arenas On NCAA Players: ‘I Don’t Pay Attention To JV’

My man.

I received only two invites to compete in NCAA bracket pools this year, down from the half-dozen or so last year. Word’s getting out. It’s not that I hate college basketball; it’s fine. But every year the calls about the farce of competition (not exploitation) that is college basketball get louder and louder, and I for one hope to do my part to turn the volume up.

Obviously not surprising, though, that those mad money cats who benefit from the NCAA’s big lights moments are doing their part to shout back. The image hounds at adidas, a year after three adidas-sponsored teams appeared in the Final Four, have come up with the ingenious idea of getting adidas-sponsored NBA stars to hawk adidas-sponsored NCAA fables. What’s even more remarkable about the March is a Brotherhood campaign is the fact that the pros getting paid for these spots, are—irony of all ironies—the same all-stars who saw no point in going college in the first place. [KG enters stage right]:

KG March is a Brotherhood

The irony here has little to do with the specific schools being hawked in these spots. (The level of unintended comedy is off the charts when it comes to TMac’s Pitino pandering as justification for his choice of Louisville. There was a period, fueled mainly by my intense hatred of anything Brad Miller-related, when I refused to pity Rick Adelman and his charmin-esque coaching techniques. TMac has made it clear even those with no backbone deserve a break.) However, what’s so incredibly mystifying about this ad campaign is that it exists at all, that some ad exec thought this kind of wacknutt revisionist spin can fly in modern sports-entertainment capitalist machines when it’s proven so disastrous in so many other facets of American culture (wait, that actually makes perfect sense).

I understand that talents/personalities like KG, Josh Smith, Dwight Howard et al are marketable commodities; I mean, unlike their matriculating brotherhood, they actually get paid for wearing adidas sneaks. But the appeal of those players (KG in particular as the modern forefather of the phenomenon) is that they co-opted cultural norms/conventions because they knew they were talented enough to legitimately do so. Some have (probably mistakenly) called that “street cred” or some other such cliché– and apparently now enough history has passed that the connection between the “cred” and the cause of it has been forgotten and/or blurred.

It’s not surprising that Brandon Jennings means nothing now because a move halfway across the world and an global economic disaster has made his trend setting utterly distant and inapplicable to the American basketball culture. So in those blurred lines, adidas by way of amateur-cum-pro baller has cleverly found the space to re-cop and recoup the imagined and constructed cred by hyping the what was once shunned. It’s almost that much worse that the choice of schools is seemingly random (minus the adidas sponsorship, of course), because then it’s that much more obvious they’re just pimping out hype for the NCAA.

This is straight up current-day Paul McCartney esque bullshit. It’s like if Roman Polanski were to return to the U.S., go to jail, and THEN film a movie about firefighters on 9/11. Or something.

Pressed by the unspoken, unquestioned and now furtively veteran status of the dress code, along with one of the best rookie classes in recent history, uniformity of purpose has become the new style of pro basketball. It’s not that personal identity no longer exists. It’s just that the punishment for a DUI now amounts to irrelevance instead of incarceration (Barkley), and the worth of a player is predicated more upon serendipitous and arbitrary financial implications than sophisticated analytical metrics like, say, winning (Iverson, Marion, Sczcerbiak, LaFrentz, Gooden, Collins, any worthless vet making more than $5mil in the last year of their contract).

This is also what makes Rip Hamilton all the more of a pioneer. It’s of course ironic that the sum-larger-than-parts Pistons championship assemblage of which Rip was such an integral, um, part, were initially regarded as revolutionary vanguards of the same quiet, dutiful dedication and athletically-honed professional (or professionally honed athleticism, your choice) now institutionalized across the whole league.

Rip’s lasting legacy, however, is found in his ability to harness individuality from necessity/technicality, e.g. the facemask. The narratives that underlie Rip’s perpetually be-facemasked face are of course wholly positive: Pygmalion/She’s All That transformation from dorky to chic (or at the very least dorky-chic); finding excitement out of the mundane / life gives you lemonade bs; finding strength out of vulnerability. In the process, Rip’s facemask has transformed his liabilities into assets: lack of size is now excess of speed, swiftness; inadequate playmaking ability become dervish off-the-ball movement; mercurial-like bad attitude becomes mercurial-like good attitude. So the Bruce Waynification (Chris Nolan version, obvs) of the facemask-adorned Rip Hamilton belies not only the subtle and delicate nature in which individuality is formed, honed, and refined, but also the fringes of league culture in which it exists.

(Side note: watched the Cavs-Hawks game on Sunday and saw a facemasked Wally Sczcerbiak for the first time, which even deepened my awe of the facemask’s uncanny transformative properties. Just as the facemask turns Rip’s weaknesses into strengths, it turns Wally’s vanilla existence into ultra-vanilla. His assets (soft shooting touch; boyish enthusiasm often expressed in the form of excessive butt slapping; gel-hardened, movement-resistant haircut) have never seemed more benign and frivolously beneficial. Wally Sczcerbiak, more than ever, is the sprinkles on the cupcake that is the Cleveland Cavs.)

The fringes, of course, are an area of league culture for which Dwayne Wade has no concern. Which is why it’s both odd that Wade borrowed a page out of the Rip Hamilton book on self-promotion, and also predictable that the Wade band-aids saga has ended the way it has. The parallels between Wade’s bandages and Rip’s facemask are notable: injury-related necessity as inspiration/excuse for self-embellishment; transformative on-court redemption (Wade’s averages over the last 5 games: 37.8 points, 5.8 rebounds, 10 assists, 3 steals, 1.8 blocks, 54.8 FG%, 1.6 3ptss, 91.5 FT%, SICK). Yet the sleight of hand that Wade clearly doesn’t see is how, in the process of naming and literally branding his weakness, Wade has confused process and execution, subject and object. What started as a curious exercise in symbolism (American flag band-aid, Flash band-aid) became a crude hack of self-aggrandizement. Rip’s facemask has power in that its meanings can alternate between both the obvious and the unstated. Subtlety is not one of Stern’s strong suits.