Obamas + Trinity = :(

Sad news.

Repeat after me:

‘Don’t hate the player; hate the game.’

‘Don’t hate the player; hate the game.’

‘Don’t hate the player; hate the game.’

Wow.  I really hate the game.

Almost Famous Athletes Whose Siblings I Know

First, you’ll remember that a couple months ago, I reported on the success of Dan Benton, brother of my friend Matt, with the San Jose Earthquakes during the MLS preseason. Well, he didn’t originally make the team, but last week San Jose made a trade with Colorado that unloaded their second-string keeper, making room for Dan on the roster. Congrats to Dan, and watch out, Becks!

Second, my friend Kym’s brother Sean is inching closer to making the men’s Olympic gymnastics squad. You can read about him at USA Today, with features coming up in Vibe, Essence, and NYTimes Magazine. At last weekend’s Visa 2008 Championships in Houston, he placed second in the vault, tied for third on still rings, and tied for eighth in the floor exercise. Now he’s one of fourteen headed to the Olympic Team Trials in Philly in July. From there, on to China.

Here he is in action on the still rings at last year’s Visa Championships.

For even better action, peep the spectacular shorts he’s posted at his site.

Second Haiku

Assassination.
Huh? What? I shouldn’t say that?
My bad. [Fingers crossed]

(If you’re commenting,
please do so in haiku form.
That’s 5, 7, 5.)

Superlatives and Comparatives

Kobe Bryant won the NBA MVP this year. He had never won the award before, despite being the (near-consensus) Best Player in the Game for the last four or five seasons. The voting wasn’t too close, as Bryant garnered 82 first place votes, Chris Paul pulled 28, Kevin Garnett 15, and LeBron James just 1. But the discussion among NBA fans and reporters was lively enough, as sports talk radio, talking heads television, and internet sports sites and blogs were all abuzz, arguing over which of the four deserved the award.

The case for/against each:

LeBron James averaged 30 points, 8 rebounds, and 7 assists and led his team to 4th place in the Eastern Conference. When I say ‘led his team,’ I mean he plays with a bunch of NBA hacks who couldn’t play their way to 20 wins without James on board. The Cavs have no relevance to basketball without him, he’s going to be one of the three or four best players in the history of the NBA, and this was his best season yet.

As good as he was, one still might expect better. He has one basic move, which is Drive to the Basket with Determination and Run Down Every Player on the Defensive Team in the Process. It’s amazing to watch, but we want more from our MVP than that.

Kevin Garnett took the Celtics from 19 wins to 66. He wasn’t alone, as Paul Pierce was an equal contributor to the team, statistically, so his numbers aren’t astounding (19 points, 9 rebounds, 3.4 assists); in fact, they’re the lowest they’ve been since his first full season of starts. Still, Pierce had been with the Celtics for a while, and he couldn’t pull the team along on his own. Garnett’s intensity, work ethic, and emotional leadership contributed to the Celtics’ success far more than the raw numbers can reflect. One can easily argue that ‘most valuable’ means something like ‘being the most significant move of an offseason for a team, then improving that team by nearly 50 wins.’ I mean, what else could it mean?

But it’s tough to get past the numbers or to hand the award to someone who may not have been the best player on his own team. It has become especially apparent in the postseason (which has nothing to do with the award) that Garnett shies away from the spotlight in a tight game, while an MVP should typically be counted on when a game is on the line.

Chris Paul put in the best year from a point guard since Oscar Robertson, scoring 21 points and dishing 11.6 assists per game in just his third year in the league. The Hornets – the New Orleans Hornets – won 56 games because of Paul’s leadership at the point position. His numbers were better than Steve Nash’s from both years Nash won the award (‘04-’05 and ‘05-’06). (In fact, Steve Nash is a huge thorn in Kobe’s side. He undeservedly won in ‘05-’06 even though Kobe should’ve been the runaway winner – more on that below – and now Bill Simmons, who each year writes the best MVP feature available, argues that since Kobe didn’t win that year – when Simmons argued that he should have – then he can’t win this year, when his numbers are down and someone else’s numbers are higher than the guy he lost to two years ago. Let’s recap Simmons’ position: 1). The voters got it wrong in ‘05-’06 and Kobe should’ve won. 2). Now we should use the instance of that wrong vote to prove why Kobe doesn’t deserve the award in ‘07-’08. Ladies and gentlemen, your gold medal winner in Logical Gymnastics, Bill Simmons!)

There aren’t many negatives, except to say that his numbers are partly a function of context. Nash didn’t score as much in his two MVP seasons because there were more scorers on his team than there are on the Hornets. Paul could have won the MVP, and no one would have been able to complain much.

Kobe Bryant didn’t have a statistically amazing season, by his standards. His 28.3 points per game is down from last year’s (31.6, which is down from the previous season’s 35.4), though his rebounds are as high as they’ve been in his career, with the exception of ‘02-’03. The argument for Kobe is that his team is winning, which is a tribute to his willingness to trust his teammates instead of trying to be a one-man show (see LeBron James). The payoff is 57 wins and the #1 seed in the Western Conference.

Some problems with the ‘team player’ argument: 1). Kobe averaged as many assists this year as he did last year.* 2). Kobe’s team is better than it has been since Shaq left** at the end of the ‘03-’04 season. He wasn’t required to do as much scoring this year because he had teammates not named Devean George, Kwame Brown, Brian Cook, or Smush Parker. 3). In fact, the most important move the team made in the offseason was probably trading in Smush Parker for Derek Fisher. Fisher isn’t a transcendent point guard, but he’s dependable and solidly above average, while Smush was a high screen and a mismatch waiting to happen. 4). Kobe spent the whole offseason complaining about the quality of his teammates and never really embraced them until the wins started coming. I don’t completely blame him (more on Kupchak below), but that’s not exactly ‘team ball.’ 5). Team success is a bad metric for MVP status. In ‘05-’06, Kobe logged a far better season than he did this year, but his team was the #7 seed in the playoffs, and this year they’re #1.

So why did Kobe win, if the main argument for him is mostly flawed? Much of it comes back to what I mentioned at the beginning – he’s been the Best Player in the League for the last half decade, but he has no MVP to show for it. Voters often hand out lifetime achievement MVPs even though the parameters of the award are technically restricted to one regular season (see Karl Malone 1998-99 or Charles Barkley 1992-93). When two players have persuasive cases to claim the award, one player’s career achievements may swing the vote in his favor. The thinking this year, I presume, is ‘Paul will have a shot at many more MVPs, while Kobe is headed into the end of his prime and may never be here again, and, oh, wouldn’t it be bad if we screwed up and never managed to get an MVP to Kobe?’

Which brings up the other question: Why is this his first? My hunch is that it all comes down to character, and there are two determining factors in Kobe’s case. The first is Eagle, CO, where Kobe was accused of rape in the summer of 2003. His accuser settled out of court, but Kobe’s reputation was absolutely shot. He lost endorsements, and he went from loveable, growing-pain-suffering up-and-comer to NBA Villain #1. This was a bad situation all the way around because some innocent person did not receive justice. Either Kobe didn’t do it, and his reputation was sullied, or he did, and the victim’s assaulter is free when he should be in jail. It’s the sort of prickly scenario that we are generally ill-equipped to deal with, and it became much easier to just hate the guy than anything else.

The second is more complicated and somewhat related to the first. We are completely inconsistent about making connections between players’ court/field personae and their personal lives, but, because we are so desperate to make these connections, we charge ahead with little self-reflection. So we overlook the fact that Jason Kidd is a horrific teammate and career coach-killer because he’s an unselfish passer. Or, we can only see Starbury’s inability to pass the ball to his teammates and miss the fact that he’s passed up millions in shoe endorsements to produce a quality, affordable product so that lower-income kids can still kick around in NBA gear. LeBron James and Michael Jordan, with their loveable commercial characters, are understood as carrying subpar teammates to victory, whereas Kobe, with his Eagle debacle, is understood as being self-centered and detrimental to his team.

Kobe benefited from the coincidence of the improvement of his teammates and the fading of the Eagle scandal so that we can convince ourselves that he has become a better person off the court because his play on the court more closely aligns to some flickering notion of unselfishness that athletes – especially Black athletes – are expected to fulfill.

In the end, I’m thrilled for my team’s player to win the MVP, but I concede that it just as easily could have gone to Chris Paul, and I’ll remain forever convinced that Nash’s second MVP rightfully belongs to the guy who scored 81 points in a game that season.

—

Mitch Kupchak, general manager of the Lakers, lost out to Danny Ainge for Executive of the Year, which I guess makes Kupchak the More Valuable GM of ‘07-’08 (as opposed to Most Valuable). Neither Ainge nor Kupchak deserves the award. Ainge fleeced the second worst GM in the NBA, Kevin McHale, to acquire Kevin Garnett on the heals of assembling a 19-win team in ‘06-’07. He pushed all his chips to the center of the table and got lucky, so now he deserves a trophy?

Kupchak is only a little better. He gets credit for the maturation of several role players – Sasha Vujacic, Luke Walton, Ronny Turiaf, Andrew Bynum, and Jordan Farmar – which is somewhat reasonable. He drafted these players, and they’ve proven to be the best bench (minus Bynum) in the league. The only problem is that he nearly alienated his best player in the process. After choosing Kobe over Shaq and signing him to a huge contract, the Lakers needed to win soon to capitalize on Kobe’s prime, so they should’ve invested more in proven veterans than young prospects.

The acquisition of Gasol is huge, of course, but Kupchack fleeced the worst GM in the league to get him. Why did that trade seem so lopsided? Because the Lakers gave up only Javaris Crittenton, Marc Gasol, and Kwame Brown to get Pau Gasol. But two of those players shouldn’t have been on the team in the first place. Crittenton was our superfluous third point guard. Had we kept Fisher for a mid-level contract four years ago, I wouldn’t be searching for Lacuna, Inc. to erase Smush Parker from my memory, and the team could’ve been more patient in allowing Farmar to mature behind Fisher and wouldn’t have felt the need to draft Crittenton. Kwame Brown was acquired for Caron Butler, a better player with a better nickname (Tough Juice; so far as I know, Brown’s nickname is simply a string of profanities). This year’s playoff lineup is really solid – Fisher, Bryant, Odom, Radmanovic, Gasol – and benefits from having Gasol ahead of Butler, but it is again an instance where Kupchak lost a couple of years of better Lakers teams, then fell bass ackwards into a championship contender.

*Assists don’t completely encompass a player’s ability to share the ball. Kobe may well have passed more often this year, but perhaps his teammates didn’t actually score as often per pass as they did last year. In other words, assists depend as much or more upon the performance of the person who receives the pass as they do on the person who passes the ball. My guess is that Kobe’s teammates didn’t score as much this year per pass as in previous years because of a higher rate of hack fouls on players who received a pass with a chance at an easy basket, which does, in fact, speak to both the quality of Kobe’s passes and the skill of the other players on the team.

**Don’t even give me the ‘It’s Kobe’s fault Shaq left argument.’ Shaq is at least as culpable as Kobe in this instance, as he’s an oversized baby who can’t stand not to be the most important person in everyone’s universe. Note that Shaq just left yet another team high and dry when his whim for basketball left him.

Fantasiatic Tu(n)esday

I liked Fantasia before she appeared on last week’s Top 3 Results episode of American Idol. I sporadically followed her the season she won and thought all along she was the best of the group. And I’ve enjoyed more than one of her subsequent releases, which have been catchy and soulful. Plus, she never felt the need to drop twenty pounds a la Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood, preferring instead to groove in the skin she’s in.After last week’s performance? I love her. Perhaps it’s because of how stale the non-Syesha performances have become in the last few weeks, but Fantasia’s ‘Bore Me’ was fresh air, an exhibition of commitment and charisma that comes with a few years of experience and success.Oh, and anyone who can get Simon to look as bewildered as he does at the 2:45 mark wins my eternal devotion.

Racing the Marx 5

So me and two other people liked Speed Racer. I’d like to think that we’re advanced, capable of appreciating truly fine art even when all of the rest of you troglodytes don’t get it. I’d like to think that everyone else’s problem is that they’re watching the movie through capitalist-colored glasses.

At the heart of Speed Racer are a couple of notions dear to Marxism. The first is easy enough, and we see it in nearly every underdog movie ever made, as well as the nationwide loathing of sports teams like the New York Yankees and Duke Blue Devils (not the Lakers, though – that’s straight jealousy). The bad guy is always the one with money who, whether he worked hard to earn it or not, is not interested in sharing and cannot value anyone beyond his/her ability to produce more money.

In this case, Speed (Emile Hirsch) and his fam, along with the help of Inspector Detector (Beno Furmann) and Racer X (Matthew Fox in a performance that can only be described as nightmarish), combat Royalton (Roger Allam), the greedy owner of Royalton racing who is single-handedly crushing the True Spirit of Racing. The corruption-by-money angle is played up at every opportunity, and Speed’s assault on the Royalton Empire is consistently portrayed as defensive; he is merely protecting something worthwhile.

Of course, any good critical theorist (I know a guy) will tell you that both capitalist and Marxist economies value people only according to their money-making abilities. Without external voices of reason, any successful economic system would run roughshod over its lesser-capital-producing minions (and, to be fair, most economic systems grow alongside these external voices and are meant to depend upon them).

The second Marxist thread running through Speed Racer is a bit more particular. While the West typically understands art as the outgrowth of social ideals*, Marxism has always understood the power art has to work in the reverse direction, shaping the culture from which it springs. That’s why, for instance, Shostakovich’s harmonic language is so much more conservative than his contemporaries who were not working in the USSR; atonality was rebellion, and the people shouldn’t hear it lest they get the wrong idea.

Throughout Speed Racer, we are reminded that Speed is more than a driver. He is an artist on wheels. And, because he is an artist, as Racer X (stiffly) reminds us before the Grand Prix, Speed can change his surroundings, revolutionize the culture of racing. The way he drives (defensively, without cheating) means he’s a Good Person; the materiality of his driving is art; and the effect of his art is to alter the lives of those who witness it. At its core, Speed Racer is a movie about conservatism, where the protagonists fight to restore an idyllic past (the last vestiges of which have have been nearly squashed) in the depressing present, and art acts as the conservative catalyst, much as Speed Racer itself tries to do in theaters today.

Of course, people actually have to see see a movie for it to enculturate them.

*The (false) distinction between art (think opera) and entertainment (think Seinfeld) is especially important here, as art is typically defined as that which would portray the best in us (refinement, complexity, decency), while entertainment is that which would tempt us away from decency. In this way, things that look, smell, and sound like art (rock, rap, Farrelly Bros. movies) are denied that particular mantel but gain the ability to influence those who participate in them. It makes it easier to blame school shootings on Marilyn Manson, gang violence on Tupac, and distrust of the legal system on NWA or Grand Theft Auto instead of considering these issues in any significant depth and finding four fingers pointing back at oneself.

John Edwards: Willing to Make the Tough Decisions

Thank goodness for political leaders with the mettle and integrity to stand up for what’s right even if what they’re standing up for is wildly popular, even when they’re faced with mobs of people screaming their approval. Thank goodness for political leaders like John Edwards, who screwed his courage to the sticking place and endorsed Barack Obama yesterday. Here’s a peek at the former senator’s itinerary for the rest of the week:

• Choose VHS over Betamax
• Hold press conference to discuss ‘good feelings’ he has about 1980 US hockey team, drawling, ‘I think these kids are really gonna surprise some folks.’
• Reject and denounce Hitler
• Learn macarena
• Find out what the big, hot, glowing orange ball of light in the sky is (oops, that’s from Huckabee’s to-do list)
• Proclaim that Citizen Kane is the greatest movie ever made
• Watch Citizen Kane
• Install software to protect computer against Y2K bug
• Free slaves
• Show up to debate Dick Cheney, thereby securing 2004 election

Baseball Metaphor

Check out any Reds blog today, and you’ll find the following video accompanied by the idea that this incident is the season in microcosm. Consider this a gratuitous posting of the same sentiment.

from redlasso.com posted with vodpod

Ironmania

The key to a successful superhero movie is the alter ego. If an audience can care enough about the regular Joe or Jane when s/he’s not flying, climbing walls, or turning green to suspend bloodlust between action sequences, a franchise can be born. Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne, Tobey Maguire as Peter Parker, and probably Ed Norton as Bruce Banner all bring impressive acting chops to their roles and flesh out what is otherwise a series of explosions and fistfights. On the other hand, Ben Affleck as Matt Murdock, Nicholas ‘I’m Going to Shteal the Declaration of Independensh’ Cage as Johnny Blaze, and Brandon Routh as Clark Kent make viewers yearn for the action sequences, during which the heroes are typically too busy fighting bad guys to blunder their lines.

So Ironman, like any other superhero flick, relies heavily on Robert Downey Jr’s portrayal of Tony Stark, the brainy-yet-incredibly-naive man beneath the iron suit. Because Stark spends a good deal of his time talking to himself or the Thinking Machines he has created, the role is ripe for the sort of forced line reading that most actors (Keanu Reeves? Who said anything about Keanu Reeves? ) peddle as monologuing.

Aside from Brad Pitt or Tom Hanks (both of whom would’ve made the role entirely different in their own ways but still interesting), I can’t think of an actor as well-suited (eh? eh?) for the role of Tony Stark/Ironman as Downey, who presumably doesn’t need other actors to bring a role to life. Of course, he has other actors and actresses who, under the direction of Jon Favreau, blossom in supporting roles. Gwyneth Paltrow, who rarely does anything for me, is absolutely charming without being a damsel-in-distress as Pepper Potts, and Jeff Bridges is pitch-perfect as Obadiah Stane. Terence Howard , though, does little beyond a rudimentary combination of The Black Friend and The Voice of Reason Friend.

Which gets to the heart of Ironman’s problem: People of Color are either completely good, completely evil, or completely helpless, with little effort for the kind of dynamic character development offered the other players in the film. The central conflict examines the complicity of the US in problems abroad, asking whether our hands are ever clean and arguing that our enemies are typically enabled by our own foreign policy. It’s difficult to complain about this sort of theme, especially in a summer blockbuster, but by limiting the range of, for instance, Afghanis, Ironman re-enforces the idea that, however we got here, our presence and force is required across the globe; the US becomes the only entity that has the power to confront absolute evil in order to assist the abject helpless.

But what did I want? A summer blockbuster with no explosions? A two-hour diplomatic romp where our cyborg hero joins his body with technology to entirely passive ends? Well, maybe. But who’s terribly naive now?

I’d rather lose myself in the particularities of the film, from the fantastic Ironman suit to Favreau’s spectacularly framed moneyshot, where Ironman strolls casually away from an aggressive tank, never breaking stride as the audience marvels at the explosion to his rear. Ironman is, in the end, a delightful flick that masterfully navigates those most difficult parts of superhero movies, maintaining its momentum between action sequences, then rewarding interest in the characters with well-choreographed, bright shining fracases, setting the bar for the blockbuster onslaught to follow.

First Haiku

I stink at haikus.
I can’t say what I want to
with so few sylla-

(If you’re commenting,
please do so in haiku form.
That’s 5, 7, 5.)