sam cassell is an alien and i love him

While the rapidly escalating impact of social media may not have contributed to the single most significant moment of the NBA offseason, there’s no doubt that it has cast the largest shadow over the evolving cultural landscape of pro basketball. Seeing as the most pioneering efforts in social media have been widely publicized throughout the summer, it may be redundant to recap some of the larger headlines here (the firing of a head coach; speculative gang affiliations; even more speculative drug use and mental health issues).  But what that exercise in redundancy hopefully reveals is noteworthy: the plotlines borne out of the social media frenzy more often than not have little to do with the NBA or even basketball itself.

Of course, that realization is also a bit redundant; sports-as-entertainment is hardly a new or innovative concept. And as much as traditional media outlets may focus on sportsmanship, competitive balance, athleticism, and other inherently incidental aspects of the modern sportsworld, the fact remains that sports, like any sector of the American entertainment industry, operates on a level far removed from what most of us consider reality.  That’s probably how it should be: we watch sports to escape reality, to get caught up in the sheer physical feats of the world’s best athletes, to marvel at the mechanical resolve of Tim Duncan’s post-up game, to stew over ridiculous rivalries like the Washington Wizards vs. Lebron James.  But these problems aren’t real and to a certain degree, they have little to do with real-world problems issues like the wavering status of my gainful employment, or my mom’s birthday today. Which of course proves why I was so interested in Mike Miller’s faux pas of wearing a pair of Lebron Nike’s to Wizards training camp.  The separation between our reality and the reality of our heroes—sports stars and entertainers alike—is, to borrow a popular Minnesota Vikings phrase, a schism sportsfans remain endlessly captivated by.

So the underlying story here is one you have to dig a bit at, and one I’ve been digging at ever since reading this op-ed on Minnesota Public Radio’s website.  The NBA officially announced its policy towards social media last Wednesday, banning the use of during game time (including pre and post game pressers), thereby placing it under the same punitive category as the dress code.  In this sense, the NBA is hardly any different, and actually might be even more lenient, than other pro sports leagues. The NBA, like all of the pro sports, reserves the right to insure the integrity of its product, so professionalism gets the nod over culture.  That NBA players as a whole have been quick to embrace Twitter, Facebook and other social media also makes them no different than many pro athletes, or more generally, any person of notoriety.

Yet the Michael Beasley and J.R. Smith sagas—with their flurries of wild speculation, reactionary cultural alarmism, and public condemnation—illustrate quite vividly how different the guidelines are for this distinct and highly-visible sector of the entertainment industry when compared to other equally distinct and highly-visible entertainers. While the reaction on the part of sportsmedia to these social media-addled plotlines has thankfully invoked a larger dose of nuance than in the past (see: here and here), the larger and more candid public response has been predictably troubling. Which is exactly why Beasley was forced to spend the end of his summer receiving treatment for mental health in rehab. And no, that doesn’t make any sense, no matter how much of a necessity David Stern, Pat Riley, or John Lucas might have claimed it to be.

Framed in that context, the MPR op-ed becomes a study in privilege.  The list of societal ills so extensively catalogued in Mark Andrejevic’s op-ed—the discrepancy between vote totals for American Idol and the presidential election; politicians’ embrace of Twitter over the headier and more scripted press release; the “rehabilitation” of faded celebrities through reality TV—starts to read like a blog entry on Stuff White People Like. In spite of, say, Shaq’s reality TV show or the existence of video games like NBA Street, the commodifiable “tinge of nostalgia” that paves the way for Tom DeLay’s “Dancing With the Stars” absolution is a fate that will remain elusive for Michael Beasley or J.R. Smith.  And thus the dichotomy that politicians crave social media while the NBA is fearful of it could not be a stronger reminder of exactly how Americans view race (or at the very least, young, rich, black basketball players) when they seek to be entertained.

And that’s how a simple perusal of MPR’s op-ed page can become a reminder of the NBA’s golden rule in the Post-MJ Era: the NBA wants to keep it real, but only up until the point that you can handle it.