It’s NBA season, finally. This comes with two things.
One, it means that on days other than Sunday, I’ve got a pro sport to follow. (Sorry, baseball.) Two, it means that, all of a sudden, all the music critics and culture bloggers and fiction writers that I follow on Twitter start obsessing over the NBA, too.
Strangely and seemingly without reason, there appears to be a massive confluence between those interested in the arts—mainly writers, as best as I can tell, whether they’re critics or artists themselves—and fans of pro basketball. I don’t know for sure why this is, but not knowing something for sure has never stopped me from talking about it in the past, and I see no reason why now would be any different.
What it likely comes down to is style. Pro basketball stands out as the arthouse flick of athletic pursuits, the showcase for beautiful maneuvers and unique, esoteric skill. Like a writer’s personal brand of writing, the best and most effective basketball players have a personal brand of basketball, characterized by their particular tendencies around the arc, in the paint, passing and dribbling and choosing a shot.
Compare this with football and baseball. (I’m excluding hockey because of its regionality, and soccer because of… well, its regionality.) Baseball has long had a reputation for being the prime playing field of the literary-minded sportswriter—think John Updike’s “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” Philip Roth’s baseball-talking Newark Jews, Paul Auster’s obsession with the sport—but with the MLB’s decline in popularity has come a similar decline in odes sung. And keep in mind, two of Updike and Roth’s greatest characters were exceptions: Rabbit Angstrom was a basketball player, and Swede Levov played three sports.
Football, on the other hand, is at the top of its powers, with pointless Monday Night Football games posting higher Nielsen ratings then near-perfect playoff baseball. But football doesn’t lend itself to the same sort of abstract poetry and aesthetic obsession. Maybe it’s the violence; maybe it’s the compartmentalization of the sport by way of its many positions and three-planed structure; maybe it’s the larger, more strategic scale and slower pace; but football writing has a sort of pugnacious aggression to it, reveling in the many subplots and fixated on certain narratives.
But basketball is different. Writers seem to flock to it, and young, Brooklyn-looking bespectacled hairy men wear their jerseys ironically. (Hoopsters, they’re called.) Seeing the Village Voice’s music critic tweet about Monta Ellis isn’t a surprise at all. I don’t know.
What I do know is that I can’t stand it when people bash the NBA—usually it’s a good indication that they haven’t watched a game since maybe the Iverson/Carter/McGrady era.
Yes, there’s still defenseless, bad pro basketball, but the best of the teams play a style that college squads can’t match: powerful and almost transcendentally skilled, a preposterous blend of finesse and weird superhuman size.
And there’s a culture that’s grown up around it, of guys writing about the sport at an incredibly high level across the blogosphere and often in conversation with one another. You see Jonathan Lethem show up in an NYMag NBA roundtable, and you’re not even surprised. It’s a lot of fun.
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