Tag: basketball

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It’s Fun to Say at the NCAA

It’s rather quaint the way University administrators and NCAA officials declare just how wonderful and pure is the devotion of their students to athletics. They play for the love of the sport; they aspire to greatness. They want to improve themselves. They want to be true to their school. They want to learn about leadership and team-building and self-sacrafice and self-denial and goal-setting and how to give everything you’ve got, for a higher purpose.

That kind of sentiment is for saps, of course, and the Administrators and Coaches and NCAA officials know it. If they claim otherwise, let’s make it simple for them: prove that you believe in the values you insist your students must believe in– you now work for nothing. You are volunteers. You get no money, no limos, no first-class flights, no suites, no dinners at the top restaurants. You too can express your purity and join in this ethereal expression of academic holiness.

Don’t be too quick to dismiss the idea. I mean, it is not likely at all that it’s going to happen, but not because it makes sense to do it the way we do it now. It will not happen because of simple, unencumbered ruthless human greed. There is no body or institution or person who is in a position to prevent the NCAA would perpetuating their positions of privilege indefinitely. There is a symbiotic relationship between college administrators, sponsors, coaches, and politicians, and they will all circle the wagons and roll out the big guns if anyone threatens the status quo.

The players, as you know, are this pure and devoted and selfless. They play for nothing. In fact, if they do accept money or gifts, they can be fined and suspended and expelled. But their coaches are among the highest paid state employees in the nation. The head of the NCAA famously drives a Porsche and lives in luxury.

What’s my problem with NCAA sports in America? Nothing. Just drop the pretense and make it what it really is: a professional league. And pay your players and provide them with decent insurance and other benefits, and cut out all the bullshit. Strip all of the Universities and Colleges of all the professional sports– let them go back to amateur athletics organized purely, solely, and exclusively by and for amateurs.

And athletic scholarships should be terminated, period. The entire idea is stupid. What is an institution of higher learning doing paying for people to come play football or basketball or to swim for them? Who says they should? Who says it wouldn’t be a better world if Universities went back to the business of education?

Let’s get rid of the vampires and pimps. And let’s have a string of institutions that are actually dedicated to higher learning: to producing smart people. Let’s value them on the basis of how good they are at doing that. And let’s put cost controls on them so that the incredibly obscene rise in tuition costs (fueled by perverse application of federal student loan guarantees) stops.

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Hoosiers Hokum

Firstly, let me acknowledge that most people don’t give a damn whether an inspirational story they liked is actually true or mostly bullshit. Personally, I don’t see anything inspirational about stories that have to lie to you to convince you that the inspirational behavior actually results in success.

In the case of “Hoosiers”, we’re supposed to be inspired by the example of the 1954 Milan basketball team: if you really work hard and show determination and try your best you can overcome incredible odds and win championship basketball games.

PBS ran the movie tonight, uninterrupted by commercials or facts. Now, there are one or two facts. The school upon which the story is based, Milan, actually did shock a much larger school by winning the state championship in 1954. And they did win the final game in the last few seconds.

Most of the other stuff in “Hoosiers” did not happen in real life.

  • they won all of the games leading up to the final by lopsided scores, sometimes in double digits, not with last second comebacks.
  • the real coach didn’t work them particularly hard: he liked to just play with them at practices; no big inspirational speeches either. In fact, these scenes look a bit cheesy in the movie.
  • the team didn’t have six players, they had ten.
  • the coach was 26 and married, not 40-something like Gene Hackman, looking for redemption, and looking silly hitting on Barbara Hershey.
  • the team manager did not come into a game and drop two “granny shots” in the last minute for a stunning victory– oh please.
  • Milan had been to the quarter finals the year before, so the whole season was not quite as shocking as the film made it seem. The movie didn’t show that. Why not? Every ask yourself, why not? Because that would indicate that what the Milan team had was talent and skill, already. The hard work and determination helped, but it’s not quite as inspirational if you know that they were born with it.
  • and I repeat: the last six or seven games were not close: not a single last minute victory among them.
  • one of the teams Milan beat was Montezuma High which had an enrollment of 79! Who was the underdog? Even so, Milan used the “cat and mouse” or chicken-shit strategy (see below) against them in the fourth quarter. Excuse me? Against a team with about half your enrollment? What is inspiring about that?
  • the Dennis Hopper character did not exist
  • it was not the first time Milan had played in the Butler Fieldhouse, so they were not likely to be intimidated by the large venue as they are depicted in the movie, with Gene Hackman melodramatically showing them that the court was exactly the same size as their home court, and the hoops were exactly the same height.

Now, I guess most basketball fans don’t have a problem with the strategy of getting close or ahead of your opponent and then dragging the ball for four minutes. I’m not exaggerating: in the final game, Milan was trailing Muncie at 28-26 and their star player, Bobby Plump, held the ball for four minutes before taking a shot. Coach Marvin Wood, in fact, admitted that he thought they would lose if they simply played basketball against Muncie. He didn’t think they could hang on. He didn’t think, in other words, that there was anything particularly inspiring going on out there on the floor.

So he had his team hang on to the ball. Just stand there, holding it. Then he had Plump take a shot… which he missed. Brilliant strategy!

So Muncie, now in possession and leading 28 to 26, did not go the chicken-shit route. They played the game like you are supposed to, like athletes with class and integrity.

They did the honorable thing.   Was there ever a more monumental fuck you to the idea of integrity and honor in sports than the decision to erase this fact from the story?

For that, they are treated as the villains in this story.

And they shot. And they missed.

Milan regained possession and hung onto the ball again until Plump was fouled. He sank both shots to tie the game. Muncie, of course, took possession.

And then, inexplicably, miraculously, Muncie gave the ball away. They ridiculously gave the ball away with two minutes left. They handed it to Milan. Milan then killed off the clock and scored and the game was over.

That’s inspirational?

It’s exciting and dramatic, like the a baseball through the legs of the first baseman, but it wasn’t the particularly brilliant play of Milan that won the game for them: they actually lost the game, in terms of strategy and play. They won it back on sheer preposterous luck, a gift from Muncie, who had the game in their hands.

The strangest thing of all, to me, is that what actually happened is a far more compelling story than the Hollywood version– it gets a bit tiresome watching all the boring speeches and the last second come-backs. Bit what really happened had drama!

I grant you that “Hoosiers” tells you up front that it is a fictionalization and does not claim to tell the accurate story of the 1954 Milan.

That’s in the details and they understand perfectly that most of the audience will fixate on the “true story” part of the tagline and believe that the story told in the film is “reasonably” accurate.

I don’t blame the movie makers for the fact that audiences routinely embrace these kinds of distortions and dishonesties.

Other Hollywood True Stories and Lies

Partisans of the movie will tell you that they had to fictionalize the movie because that’s just how they do it and otherwise it wouldn’t be a good movie.

Of course they do.  That’s not the issue.  The issue is when they change facts that are absolutely germane to the appeal of the story, like when they make the people who captured the Enigma machine in World War II American instead of British, to cater to the vanity of American audiences, or when they show Nash’s wife being loyal and still married to him at the time of his Nobel Prize so they can have her shedding tears in the audience.

It amazes me that anyone accepts this logic. Nothing is more interesting than honesty, and the the only reason the film is at all suspenseful is because of an infinite supply of self-delusion.

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Allen Inverson

Allen Iverson is a point guard on the Philadelphia 76ers. He is possibly the most promising young talent in the game. The Sixers pay him $9.4 million over three years, but he also receives endorsement money from Reebok. It costs $54 a ticket to watch Allen Iverson play.

Iverson grew up in Hampton, Virginia, in the ghetto, in a dilapidated house that was frequently unheated because his mother, who was 15-years-old when he was born, could not afford to pay the bills. The house reeked of backed-up sewage.

As he grew up, Allen watched friend after friend die violently in gang turf wars. Allen’s father served time–for stabbing a girlfriend–as did his step-father. But Allen was born with a gift, and he worked hard to perfect it. He starred in high school basketball, and then for two years at university. Then he hit the big time: the NBA.

Now that he is a millionaire, Iverson has moved his mother, his sisters, his aunts, his uncles… just about everyone in his extended family, and his girlfriend and two children of his own, into decent housing outside of Philadelphia. He also supports two full-time body-guards.

Who is after Allen Iverson? I don’t know. But every important person has a body-guard.

Allen Iverson served some time in jail when he was in high school because he was in a bowling alley when a riot broke out between some whites and blacks. The police arrived and arrested four blacks, including Iverson, and none of the whites. He was alleged to have thrown a chair that struck a woman in the head. He received five years in penitentiary even though he had no previous convictions and insisted that he had left the alley immediately after the trouble started. His conviction was later over-turned upon appeal and erased from his record.

Did you read that carefully? A young black man with no previous convictions received a 5-year sentence for allegedly throwing a chair at a woman during a fight in a bowling alley. Five years. Isn’t that a little harsh? What does five years in prison do to a young man like Allen Iverson? What do you have when he comes out? Do you think that when he comes out, he will say to himself, “Whoa! I’ll never do that again!”

Allen’s high school friends can’t afford the $54 it takes to see Allen play, but Sports Illustrated reports that some of the white men who can afford it heckle Iverson mercilessly.

What does Allen spend his millions on, after supporting his extended family? Incredibly tasteless, ostentatious jewelry, a red Jaguar for his mother, a Mercedes Benz for himself. Whatever he wants.

This is the face of the modern pro athlete. Everyone I know complains bitterly about the absurdly excessive amounts of money these athletes are paid. When we find out what they spend that money on, we are sometimes shocked at the waste and extravagance. We are disappointed that they don’t seem to put the money back into the poverty-stricken communities they came from.

Salaries for professional athletes entered the realm of absurdity years ago. Everyone seems to know it, but no one seems to know any way to stop it. And they keep going: the latest contracts are for over $100 million. This is beyond idiocy and absurdity: it is pure madness.

But the story of Allen Iverson should give us pause. It is one thing for comfortable, middle-class whites to stand appalled at the state of affairs in professional sports; it is quite another for a black-teenager from an American ghetto. For many of these teenagers, their only hope of leaving their poverty behind is either drug-dealing or professional sports. In some ways, Iverson’s huge salary is his payoff for suffering years of abuse and degradation.

Consider also the case of Latrell Sprewell, who assaulted his own coach, P.J. Carlesimo. The team and the League did the right thing, for once. The team terminated his contract and the NBA suspended him. Astonishingly, an arbitrator over-ruled both, shortened the suspension to six months, and reinstated his $17 million contract. Once again, we are beyond the realm of the unusual and into the realm of the completely bizarre. If you physically attacked and injured your supervisor, do you think you would be merely suspended? Where would you find an arbitrator dumb enough to reinstate you at full salary?

Given the general weirdness of all this, is it so hard to believe that the CIA deliberately encouraged drug-use by inner-city blacks, or that the budget deficit was the result of a conspiracy among bankers, investors, and the military, to convince the general public that government spending was out of control and force social spending down while continuing to line their own pockets? If you carefully analyze the changes in tax law over the past twenty years, two things are clear:

  • a huge chunk of the deficit spending went into the pockets of military contractors and suppliers (think of the infamous $450 hammers charged to the Pentagon)
  • a huge chunk of the taxes that will pay off the deficit is coming from the pockets of hard-working, average citizens, because of all the tax cuts and deductions that benefit the rich
  • the budget deficit did not hurt the rich one little bit. While you and I were constantly told that we had to lower our expectations, cut back, and make sacrifices, accept down-sizing, because times are tough, the rich continued to increase their own salaries and profits, sometimes by astronomical sums.

What has this got to do with Allen Iverson and basketball? Just part of the general weirdness of our economic system, that’s all. Millions of people go to work every day. They spend hours and hours working hard, doing various challenging tasks, and thusly they generate enormous wealth. Where does this wealth go? Well, we know that you and I are getting about the same amount we got twenty years ago, maybe a little less. On the other hand, professional athletes, heads of corporations, and Al Dunlap– the man who is famous for taking “down-sizing” to extreme heights in the name of shareholder profits–are all making way, way, way more than they used to. Bank profits are way up. Microsoft is making a bundle. Oprah Winfrey, Bill Cosby, Madonna…. In 1990, the average NHL salary was $200,000. Today it is $1.1 million. When was the last time you got an increase in your pay?

Money moves around. We ought to pay close attention to how it moves around. There is one thing that is resoundingly clear about the way it moves around: pretty well anybody who can take more, will take more. There is no restraint on human greed. Some people regard unions as greedy. That may be true, but the difference is that unions distribute wealth far more widely than corporations do, and history tells us that the more widely and evenly wealth is distributed, the safer and healthier a society is.