Life, Love, and Basketball
(a sestina)

For a lifetime, this has been his team.
Seventeen championships – four of which he has seen – they are without peer.
An obsession for him: no matter where he has lived,
he dreamed imaginary ballgames, along with careers and families. Now the title
of “father” is a reality. There is no more time to dream: the effect
of being tethered to a spot on earth with his children. No, not Boston -

which is implacable – but actual concrete and soil. Where Boston
is just an idea, his children are real and teeming
with possibility. For his Celtics, he feels something to the same effect,
as every challenge flashes then slowly disappears.
Many doubt the Celtics are entitled
to this playoff run, just as he doubts he has earned the life he lives.

But then, this doubt is the reason he lives.
He questions his own memory – maybe because he’s from Boston.
The Celtics fan – once almost entitled
to success, if not in life, then of his team -
as a father now dances over midnights, peers
at each coming day, thinking of ways to make them perfect.

This June night, his hometown squad can affect
tomorrow. There are no religious icons here to believe
in, pray to – just a glowing television and yelps that pierce
the quiet hours before bed. Three miles from Downtown Boston,
this fan draws energy from the Celtics, and self-esteem
from his children fighting the intermittent tidal

waves of sleep and sleeplessness. No father is entitled
to a full night’s rest anyway. So why not let a game affect
him? The clock climbs over itself and his head teems
with more doubts. The playoffs don’t relieve
a father of his duties, but at least tonight in Boston,
the rules for fans usurp those for fathers – so it appears.

This man constantly departs. Reappears.
Sings children to sleep, screams silence at games, writes poems with no titles.
It has never been so good to be in Boston -
a lovely ugly setting, where home sometimes exists. It is perfect.
There may be other cities more enjoyable to live,
but his children are here in this city – and so is his team.

The City of Boston hopes Captain Paul Pierce
can help steer this magnificent team to another title -
if for no other effect than to remind us we’re alive.

AI has been in the sports news for a few days now because he took a leave of absence from his current team – the Memphis Grizzlies – for personal reasons; sports reporters tend to think his issues had to do with not being a starter for the team. Now the Internets are abuzz with rumors of his impending retirement. Drama drama drama.

But lost amidst the talk of the sky falling and the devil returning to steal our children, why isn’t anyone talking about how dope Allen Iverson was?

He doesn’t even break six feet and still managed to cop the Rookie of the Year, one MVP, and 4 scoring titles. He even single-handedly led a terrible 76ers squad the the NBA Finals. (How terrible? Matt Geiger got run on this team.)

But men in suits have been trying to dethrone AI as the king of the NBA for years, trying to replace him with blander-than-Corn Flakes Kobe Bryant or Lebron “Not a businessman, I’m a business, man” James. But those of us who know know that AI is the post-Jordan player.

He was drafted the summer before I went to college, so I’ve basically been watching him my entire adult life. And it was perfect timing too, because he still got to play against MJ when he was still, you know, worth playing. And we all know what happened, AI broke his ankles:

He’s easily the best little man since Isiah Thomas (I don’t want to hear John Stockton’s name right here…) – but check his online rep and you’ll find as much hate as love, probably more hate than love.

And the reason is because Iverson was and still is just too black. Yeah I said it. (more…)

I like pro sports, and the NBA in particular. I am not blind to the way it replicates exploitative systems from larger society – but in the same way we can appreciate a clever political campaign, a day of unexpected beautiful weather, or a well-crafted children’s picture book – so too do I appreciate watching NBA basketball. It is theater for the oppressed. (No Freire)

In honor of the new NBA season getting underway tonight (!!!), I’m putting up a list of my favorite Celtics players during my lifetime. There’s basically two loose guidelines: 1) I have to like them for what they did for the Celtics – no Gary Payton, no Dominique Wilkins, no Chauncey Billups and the like, and 2) I have to have watched them play, thus no Russell, no Jojo White (my mom’s favorite), no Bob Cousy, etc.

Let’s get it started…

10. Tom Heinsohn
Allow me to start off this list by breaking my own rule. Of course I never saw Tommy play: he retired in 1965, and coached until 1978 – the year I was born. So I’ve known him in my lifetime primarily as a broadcaster. And the great thing about him is that over the years, he’s gotten more and more crotchety and biased. Almost every time a Celtics player get called for a foul, Tommy gets livid and screams about how the refs are terrible. But my favorite is when they look at a replay and see the Celtic in question was undeniably guilty of committing the foul, he’ll usually mutter a retraction under his breath – then talk about how the other team has been doing the same thing all game and never got called for it.

9. Dee Brown
A Celtic won the slam dunk contest! Throughout the 80s, the Celtics were known throughout the land as the blue-collar, not very athletic NBA team. So when Dee won the slam dunk contest when I was in middle school – woooooooo! It wasn’t just the dunking ability, but it was mostly the flair. The blindfold dunk and the little act of pumping up his sneakers before every attempt! I waited in line for 2 hours at the Cambridgeside Galleria to get his autograph on a mini Celtics basketball. Uh. I lost it. Still though, he had a nice career in the NBA, so I’ll have a special place in my memory for him.

8. Kevin Garnett
He’s only been here two years, and he’s in the top 10 Celtics players of my lifetime? ANYTHING’S POSSIBLE!!!

(more…)

Allen Iverson – forever a member of my Top 5 Dead or Alive – showed up for All Star Weekend without his braids.

Damn homey.

Yeah yeah so he won like 8 gold medals at the Summer Olympics and we were supposed to love him and everything. People started throwing around phrases like “Greatest Olympian in History” and “Greatest Athlete of All Time” and it all kind of seemed to fit because he did something nobody had ever done before. EVAR!

But what was aggravating about it to me was how he competed in 8 events and won them all and got the accolades from the press, but I didn’t hear the press saying that swimming is the only sport you can win that many medals. USA Men’s Basketball played 8 games as well, and won every single one of them, yet in the end, players received ONE gold medal apiece.

And so even though it was kind of exciting that he was so dominant in a sport I’d never cared about before, my initial Phelps fandom disappeared about 5 seconds into the first interview I saw him do on TV. The words he “says” seem to fall out of his mouth like chewed food, making him annoying to both hear and see. But worse than that was how he presented himself, like the adulation was long overdue. He had a huge chip on his shoulder, which probably stemmed from the fact that he’s been a douche his whole life and nobody has ever wanted to be his friend.

Am I making an unfair assumption? I doubt it. How many times have you done something you wouldn’t want the world to know about? And don’t people always have cameras around? But isn’t it fairly rare that you or your friends have truly damaging pictures plastered all over the Internets? For someone who has as much to lose as Phelps to have one of his “friends” straight sell him out like that, he must be an insufferable prick.

While I don’t get down with smoking, it’s not so much the smoking that bothers me. It’s the attitude that he can do whatever he wants because people love him. But the thing is, nobody loves you anymore Michael. Your body is shaped weird, you house loose marbles under your tongue, and most of all, you act like a dbag. Who wears their hat backwards? Were those the 2008 Olympics or was that 1988?

(more…)

Until now.

So now that need has been met. Let’s move on.

I have never paid attention to horse-racing ever in my life, but the events of this past weekend have got the wheels spinning a little in my head.

So Eight Belles, one of the horses running in the Kentucky Derby, broke two ankles during the race and was euthanized on the racetrack. My reaction was to immediately question why this horse couldn’t simply have been allowed to live and see her ankles heal and simply hang out in a field the rest of her life. What I found online is that horses generally can’t heal from broken legs and ankles, and not euthanizing a horse after such an injury would actually amount to torture as the healing process for a horse is very painful and oftentimes fatal.

So naturally, my second question was – seriously? If these injuries, which you hear about often enough for the general public to know racehorses are euthanized, are relatively common, why do we have horse racing at all? Isn’t that somewhat needless?

And again the Internets provided the answer. Horses run in the wild as well, and they in fact race each other naturally, so doing so on a track is pretty much giving them a place to do it, and also allows people to get some enjoyment and cash out of it. OK, that makes sense I suppose. There seems to be some acknowledgment that breeding racehorses does result in animals that are a bit more likely to break a bone, and while that doesn’t exactly seem ethical, I’m really not an expert on the matter, and it’s hard for me to judge what’s really acceptable without being very well acquainted with the sport.

Now if you know me, then you probably know where I’m going next. What is the major difference between supporting horse racing, a sport in which animals are bred to be more likely to die than they would be in the wild, and dogfighting, a sport in which animals are bred to be more likely to die than they would be in the wild? How are clips of dogfights shown on CNN with a warning, but the Kentucky Derby is nationally televised to an adulating audience? Why are dogfight losers considered “brutally” killed, and Eight Belles was “euthanized?” How does Michael Vick get 23 months in prison, but the owner of Eight Belles gets a letter from PETA?

And as usual, I’m not advocating for the filly’s owner to be tried as a criminal and locked up, I’m just saying, there’s somethign a little uneven here, and if you just think about what types of folks tend to be into horse racing, and what types of folks tend to be into dogfighting, and I’m just saying, the different way they get treated has more than a little bit to do with the race and relative wealth of the audience.

There are a lot of reasons why I feel silly being a big sports fan. The rampant sexism, the more subtle but as-rampant casual racism, the proclivity of many fans to identify jingoistically with their favorite teams, the enjoyment many fans get out of watching injury-causing plays, the faux-nostalgia created as a marketing tool, the corruption of American university systems in an effort to become pro sports powerhouses, the blatant disregard for human life at baseball academies in the Dominican, the pro-corporate/”people? what people?” attitudes pushed by superstars like Michael Jordan and LeBron James, and on and on (a la Journey).

But with all these things that gnaw at my insides from further inside, I may sound like the biggest hypocrite in the world when I say it’s only entertainment (a la Journey, I mean, Jay-Z), which it is. I tried to quit watching sports in 2004, but it proved to be more addictive than nicotine. I relapsed, and what with my Boston-area teams doing pretty well recently, I don’t really think I’m going to wean myself off watching sports until I’m dead.

But not all is awful. It’s not as though it’s the ugliness that keeps me watching. So without further ado, I present to you my friends, the Top 10 Awesomest Moments in Sports (EVAR!), as compiled by me with absolutely no illusions of historical perspective, regional unbiasedness, or intelligence.

1. Derek Redmond and his dad
A British sprinter who had pulled out of competition during the 1988 Olympics in Seoul because of a hamstring injury, Derek Redmond had a legit shot at a medal in Barcelona, but during the heat that would have put him in the finals – he had a steady lead more than halfway through the 400m – his hammie jumped on him again, and he fell to the ground. His dad jumped out the stands and ran onto the field of play and helped his son up on his one good leg and together they hobbled to the finish line. With all the stories you hear about overbearing parents of athletes, this is one of the stories that gets forgotten.

2. Muhammad Ali gets stripped of his title for refusing to be drafted
As I mentioned earlier, modern-day superstars are too concerned with their endorsement deals to ever take a stand on anything remotely political. So when the biggest public figure in the sports world in 1966 refused to be drafted to fight in the war in Southeast Asia, that shit took huge balls. He didn’t really have to do it either. Because of his celebrity, he would have gotten a non-combat job, maybe one of those morale-boosting jobs like going to talk to “fellow” soldiers to convince them they were fighting for a just cause. But he refused and as a result, lost his title as world champion. And he didn’t complain at all, simply saying “No, I am not going 10,000 miles to help murder kill and burn other people to simply help continue the domination of white slavemasters over dark people the world over. This is the day and age when such evil injustice must come to an end.” The crazy shit is, everybody loves him now, proving that the real world can actually be changed for the better by athletes.

(more…)

If this was a video game, we could just turn off the console and start the day over and Yao would never have this injury. Unfortunately, this is real life, and my favorite NBA player is out the rest of the year with a fracture in his foot. Below, please find a photo of him making a face that illustrates how every Rockets fan feels right now:

(more…)

I begin this blog post with two pieces of information, which will seem unrelated. Please bear with me.

1. Yesterday, over at the Hyphen Magazine blog, there was this really interesting entry about the stage revival of Joy Luck Club. Interesting not because I’m a big Amy Tan fan, but more about the personal story that Neela, the post’s author, shares about being 15 and naively loving the movie because any representation – no matter how simplistic and self-loathing the material – was better than no representation. It brought back memories of purchasing Sex Packets by Digital Underground (on cassette!) when I was I guess 10 or 11, and actually feeling kind of proud when the guy in the skit was telling the packet dealer, “give me the Chinese girl man.” It was like, I never heard anybody say anything about Chinese people – except Chuck Norris, who had me actively hating the Chinese villains – and so I was like, “Cool! Digital Underground likes Chinese people! That’s probably because they’re from California…”

2. The Boston Red Sox victory parade was held yesterday as well. A bunch of people at work headed down there, as did my mom. Exciting times, I mean we haven’t had a major sports championship parade in Boston since, man, like, almost three years now! I can barely remember 2005 when the Patriots had the thing, then in 2004 the Patriots and the Red Sox won, and if I stretch, I can vaguely recall 2002 when the Patriots won the Super Bowl. Imagine, for some toddlers, this is their very first Boston team championship! But the one thing that has struck me as really bizarre for several years is the songs the Red Sox have chosen to affiliate themselves with.

The two I’m thinking of are “Dirty Water” by the Standells and “Sweet Caroline” by Neil Diamond. The former is about how Boston is home to “muggers and thieves” and how women have to “be in by 12 o’clock.” The latter is about a couple in love that basically grows up together (but the song was used as a sing-along in the movie “Beautiful Girls,” which took place somewhere in rural Massachusetts – the connection to New England is weak, I know). The Standells were a California band from the 19060s, using a 12 bar song structure most closely associated with the Delta blues. Neil Diamond is from Brooklyn. Are these really the best songs the Boston Red Sox could find to represent themselves?

Click here to read the rest of this entry (at BPRLive.org)

Message to the Red Sox:

Re-sign Mike Lowell! The dude is a cancer survivor and an across the board favorite. And now World Series MVP!