Amateurism knows no age limit
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]:
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.