“…for Time eats up the work of man”

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May 18, 2016
Basketball, NBA
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Noah Graham/Getty Images

Inevitability in sports is simply an extension of the existing tension between favorites and underdogs. What seems inevitable at any given time in any given sports is that which the rest of the sport attempts to topple. A certain pursuit of destruction of the status quo keeps the standard-bearers honest and the rest earnest. What is remains; what will be, will be.

For so many reasons, both external and internal, the Golden State Warriors have seized the NBA’s current moment. What LeBron James is to the Eastern Conference, the Warriors have become to the entire league, the defining signpost any opponent must pass on the way to a championship. Once a seemingly burgeoning dynasty, however, the Thunder isn’t here for the noise. Now, after a franchise-altering trade and a series upset of the NBA’s most consistent team, nothing is inevitable in Oklahoma City.

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They, The North

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May 17, 2016
America, Basketball, NBA, Sports
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So, Canada. The stereotypes abound for our neighbor to the north, from being polite to the point of apology to a seeming national mandate to wear flannel and grow beards to an unconscious appetite for maple syrup and Molson. At the moment, the country’s greatest export is a former teen actor-turned-living PBR&B emoticon who has enough #VIEWS to spawn several generations of memes. Innocuous, vaguely socialist and definitely non-confrontational: this is the Canada we know and love°.

A nation with seven (7) NHL teams and only one NBA franchise has this season seen its hockey teams fail to produce a single playoff participant – when half the league goes to the playoffs – and its basketball team reach its final four. Thus far, the Toronto Raptors have played two seven-game series and are arguably lucky to have escaped both on their way to the Eastern Conference Finals. Nevertheless, Toronto did make it, and though the spectre of the league’s most dominant player awaits them, it would seem foolish to write off the resident reptilians.

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Though Life Would Still Go On

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May 16, 2016
America, Music, Politics, Pop, Pop Culture, Religion, Rock
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Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

There’s a moment at the very beginning of “Sloop John B,” the closing track of the first side of the album but the first recorded for it, right after the initial glockenspiel tone, that acts as a sort of timeout, as if to give the listener a chance to breathe before launching into another lament. Critics have sometimes met the song, adapted from a Bahamian folk standard, with confusion, wondering where the tale of a doomed ship and its crew fits in alongside the other tracks on the album.

The album, of course, is the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, which was released fifty years ago today, originally to mixed reviews which have since gone almost entirely and overwhelmingly positive. Beyond critical reception, Pet Sounds has enjoyed the luxury of indelible influence, assuring its permanent place in the musical version of the United States’ Great books for its lush instrumentation, unthinkably cohesive vocals and relatively simple, ageless lyrics of hope, heartbreak, loyalty and alienation.

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A Tired 76ers Fan’s Take on the NBA Draft Lottery

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May 16, 2016
Basketball, Sports
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“This is my lowest point as a Philly sports fan” was the first post I saw on Facebook after the news broke that Sam Hinkie had resigned from his role as the General Manager of the Philadelphia 76ers. Yes, it was a sincere post. I know because it was written by a close friend, one of many such friends and fellow Sixers fans echoing sentiments of pure anguish on my various social media feeds. To an outside observer, this type of negativity might seem out of place. Typically, change from top to bottom is welcomed by fans of a professional sports team that has finished near last place in the standings for three straight years. In that situation, any type of change could signify a much needed fresh start. It potentially marks the beginning of a so-called “rebuilding phase.”

This is similar to when a movie series reboots after a disappointing sequel. Reboots and rebuilds usually create a sense of hope that things will improve. Sometimes, that sense of hope appears to be the main impetus for the change, because hope can bring back fans who have given up on the team°. Of course, a large number of 76ers fans are atypical in this regard because they did not want change. They are even more atypical because they already had hope. Along with pride, hope might have been all they had.

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Radiant Children

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May 14, 2016
Auto Racing, Pop Culture, Sports
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Brad Binder & Team Parc Ferme Termas de Río Hondo 2016

Given the exhibition’s modest title, Van Gogh’s Bedrooms at The Art Institute of Chicago made for a considerable cultural experience before it closed this past week. Curators devised a show winding its way from a giant wall-sized map detailing all 37 of the Dutch artist’s chronicled residences to a serpentine timeline of his life wrapping its way into rooms replete with exotic pieces that influenced him, carefully positioned portraits and drawings, and even a life-sized imitation of the Yellow House’s bedroom itself. The whole thing culminated in the three Arles paintings arranged alongside one another in chronological order. For an exhibit about an alarmingly cramped bedroom, you got your money’s worth.

You had to, really – maybe it’s heartening to see from a cultural studies perspective but, as a sane patron, waiting in line for 90 minutes (or more during peak weekend hours) can turn from enriching to scut work, even if it is art’s most famous sleeping quarters.

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Prisoner of Reality

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May 12, 2016
Baseball, MLB, Sports
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It’s as curious a sight to behold as any in sport: a 5’11” rolling hill, officially listed at 265 lbs. but closer to 285 and probably more, steps to the plate in a Major League Baseball stadium, adjusts his batting helmet and looks toward his inevitably slimmer counterpart. Carrying his bat like the reluctant uncle drawn into a wiffle ball game at a family reunion, he assumes his stance, utilitarian if not necessarily poetic, and awaits the pitch.

Nominally but a starting pitcher for the New York Mets, Bartolo Colon is so much more: the lovable symbol of a generally likable franchise in an otherwise reviled sports city; a former Cy Young Award winner – and, yes, PED user – whose first appearance in a World Series had to wait until the age of 42; a hypothetical proxy for the man watching baseball on his couch after doing, or ignoring, yard work. What should seemingly hold him back, his ungraceful body, is precisely what carries him forth. And nothing in baseball has become quite so captivating as watching Colon at the bat.

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Once In a Lifetime

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May 4, 2016
Fantasy, Soccer, Sports
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For all the talk about sports being an escape from reality, the reason so many of us enjoy them is the same reason many people enjoy video games or trash television: they are just close enough to life itself that, for the time we spend indulging in them, we feel apart of something. Better yet, that something isn’t necessarily happening to us, like missing a green light or getting unexpectedly charged an exorbitant gratuity, so we can be as attached or unattached as we want.

Going a step further, sometimes sports can function as a perfect facsimile for life, really. Excessive hope leading to monumental disappointment; lowered expectations giving way to delightful surprises; and beauty presenting itself as madness, or vice versa. At various points over the last eighteen months or so, Leicester City F.C. has embodied all of these. Yet now, only one distinction matters to the team and its fans: champions of England.

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Veni Vidi Vicious

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April 29, 2016
Basketball, NBA
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David Foster/Charlotte Observer

Respect in sports is personal, as subjective a concept as can be. People respect seeming effortlessness, as in the case of Steph Curry’s cocksure 35-foot bombs under duress. Those same people may value in the same measure the distinct work ethic required to reach Curry’s dominance in the first place. Earning respect takes a variety of forms – achieving an objective preeminence helps, but so does fighting on behalf of a teammate and playing through the end of a long-dead season with as much tenacity as at the start.

Two separate, but thus far equal, entities continue to struggle with earning the respect of fans and casual observers. For the Charlotte Hornets, an identity crisis has stifled interest in a relatively small – but growing – basketball market, whose most notable notoriety this month comes on the heels of legislation rather than the home team’s magnificently disciplined run to and through the playoffs. For the Cleveland Cavaliers, another issue of identity has chased the team for two seasons. In both cases, fairness never bothers to pick up the phone.

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Til the Casket Drops

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April 29, 2016
Basketball, NBA, Sports
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On the Waterfront (1954, Columbia Pictures)

“I apologize for us being healthy. I apologize for us playing who was in front of us. I apologize for all the accolades we received as a team and individually. I’m very, truly sorry, and we’ll rectify that situation this year.” – Steph Curry, October 2015

So often, when assessing the circumstances surrounding a season and its participants, onlookers make the critical error without the proper framing. This is true of culture – Lemonade as the greatest work of artistic liberation this year, this decade or this century, let alone this week – but is dominant in sports. Conversations abound concerning Karl-Anthony Towns’ place in the all-time NBA player hierarchy with, now, nearly as much frequency as LeBron James’, if you look in the right places.

Rare is the situation that doesn’t need the benefit of hindsight to have a definitive historical identity waiting in the wings. This season, the NBA gave us two, possibly three, teams whose historical contexts seem almost preordained. Rarer still is the fact that each team faces unique circumstances which are fascinating in a vacuum but even more so when contrasted with one another.

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Alone In A World So Cold

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April 24, 2016
Hockey, Sports
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It just had to be Pittsburgh, didn’t it? Then again, saying “it had to be” and following that with nearly any Eastern Conference playoff team – Washington, Philadelphia, Tampa Bay, Detroit, the other New York team – would carry the same air of inevitability. Sooner or later, one of these teams was going to fell the New York Rangers, who have been on the business end of a Sisyphean task for the last half-decade.

Almost mercifully, the window of realistic Stanley Cup contention seems to have closed definitively for this era of Rangers hockey, opening a new aperture full of uncertainty. For players like Dan Boyle and Keith Yandle, the future seems unlikely to include diagonal letters and the collective nonchalance of Madison Square Garden. Nothing left to do but clean out the locker and move on to new, gray pastures. For someone like Henrik Lundqvist, however, the boulder remains, and the mountain only gets taller and steeper with each passing revolution about the sun.

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