Mobilization, pure diversion
The false sanctity of Christmas Day games, a compulsion for entertainment, and team hardship signings in the limbo week before the New Year.
The apartment is very quiet. After days of rain and fog, there’s snow again. A light fuzz in the air, television static or icing sugar sieved down on a cake from a heavy hand. This week between Christmas and New Years’s has always held in it a loose agitation for me. A feeling of waiting, but not very well. Some of that comes from wanting to be on with it, some probably from looking back, but this stretch of time, when I’m honest about it, is like a gift I’m getting better and more gracious at receiving whether or not I asked for it or thought I needed it. Time stripped of its urgency. Time, if you are able to take it, that sidles and shifts in its usual allocation. Waking in the middle of the night is the same as waking in the afternoon on the couch under the book you let slip to your chest for just a second.
I have a lot of urgency in me. There are assignments I’m due to finish I’ve yet to start, research, people I need to schedule time with, cold calls I need to make. There is vigilance to be kept up, friends I need to meet for circuitous walks outside again. There’s the water I’m actually longing, like some depressed salmon, to get back to. They’d just started to turn the underwater lights on in the pool to go up against winter’s persistent murk in the windows, I’d just got a new suit so I could rotate, my breath was coming steady in strong bubble streams my arms churned away in lap after lap, but that’s all shut down for now.
Maybe the last thing you want is more time, after a year of it piling up and vanishing simultaneously, no way to keep it straight, to make it last. But this little cord of days until we’re meant to make promises to ourselves about how we’re going to spend the next formal year’s worth is like time taken off the hook. Meaningful for how little it demands of you.
The sanctity of Christmas Day games in the NBA is strange as it is cloying, like a relative who shows up to dinner with costume jewellery and too much perfume. The occasion’s made up so what is the point of crying foul, like I’ve seen an awful lot of people doing, over the games this year being strung together by the good grace and plain luck of guys coming in on 10-days who happen to be less familiar to the people making the complaints.
Do Stanley Johnson or Theo Pinson care very much that some people would rather, what, not have those games played than see these guys playing in them? They don’t. They were too busy getting themselves to Los Angeles and the honest to god desolate as hell basin of Salt Lake City to play those games to spare much of a thought to strangers watching in sweats from the couch, sputtering over sanctity, little crumbs of stuffing crusted stiff into their sweaters.
These games were made to draw — crowds, viewers, time — not to feign at the intensity of two teams trying to clinch the same playoff spot in early-April. You are, watching, at leisure, and the NBA is there to entertain you as you doze, or are called away into other rooms by the obligation of family and occasion. To say that this year’s games suffered because the names of some of the people playing in them were less familiar only succeeds in proving how performative the day’s parameters of divinity. The superstars playing, or meant to be playing, in each match have that mantle 60% from skill, 40% from jersey sales leading up to the very same day. Besides, have you ever seen Giannis Antetokounmpo, Steph Curry or Luka Doncic play their hardest at 2:30, 5 or 10:30pm for a crowd clad in Santa hats reimagined in team colours? This is entertainment, pure diversion. Keeping everyone, players and you, away from their families.
If there were stakes, the league would hold one of the day’s five games as a wildcard slot, to be decided three weeks out from the date and not collated by conference. Chicago vs. Miami, Cleveland vs. Memphis, one matchup not decided in the gloaming cast of last season or the subjective remnants of marquee franchises with so many of their bulbs burnt out. The NBA appears happy enough to tout the pandemic data it holds close to the chest as reason enough that it would make no difference to pause the season, why not apply that far enough out from Christmas to predict in its largest markets which players are most likely to be waylaid by this or the next variant, by virtue of community spread alone? Is it callous, to make predictions like that? It’s no less callous than going on as-is with all of the information and watching, now, as the guys who played in games on the 25th test positive and/or enter very predictably into health and safety protocols. I’d argue it would be, as far as corporate responsibility driven by profit goes, at least realistically proactive.
Mobilization, that’s what this is. Bodies, yes, unfortunately being described only as such, but bodies moving en masse, probably more than the NBA, any pro sports league, has ever seen. This many people, over this short a time, coming in from far flung places like Greensboro, North Carolina and Ontario, California to take up the prospects and jerseys and tactical plays of teams that may as well represent entire counties in their inner workings and infrastructure rather than the big cities they’re bound by, to these guys. It’s very difficult, all this.
Not for the league, but I’ll start with their false flag all the same. The NBA saw from a great distance this outcome on the way. The bizarre if not delusional passivity in waiting, biding its time up on the moral and backbone equivalent of a very tall hill as the tidal wave of Omicron came in crushing and slow. Slow for a league that marshalled its entire season to restart in a theme park, hardwood laid out shining as promise in so many hotel ballrooms and daily mechanics like testing and food preparation and leisure organized as meticulously as if in the idealized version of wartime.
So no, not difficult for the NBA in any sense of hardship, despite the naming of its newest policies. Difficult for the players, though, putting their names down on those hardship exemptions. To join teams on the road, full of strangers, to meet them in film sessions where they will study film for the first time of their own team, the one they are now wearing across their fronts and backs, in order to get some sense of the way things are done, the way they’ll be expected to do them in an hour or two if they’re lucky. And they are lucky. They know because they know and because they also keep hearing it. What an opportunity this mess is. And it is! That’s also what’s difficult, to grapple with how much hope is tied up in these less than two-week contracts. A lifetime of it honed and made to be ready at any moment. To hit the floor, to help, to do everything they can to make it so they can ration out that hope a little longer.
Assuming some of these guys had ramp-up time in the G League and aren’t going to get more minutes at once than the soft tissue of their bodies can handle, they also have to stay healthy. That is, out of the NBA’s now ubiquitous shorthand of health and safety. To guard against a virus freewheeling across the country on some of the flights they’re probably on so they don’t finally make it to where they’re going and find oh, this flashing light, this little blue or red line, this long swab dredged from either nostril means their 10-day is forfeit because they’ll be spending it in quarantine.
Mobilization is as synonymous with conquest as it is entertainment. There is the necessary transience of sports, parsed from its origins in entertainment, that amusement has got to move. To stay in one place is to grow stagnant, but also to stay in one place, one town, meant the money would run out. How many people would keep paying to see the same show? It can feel grotesque, a little bit, to think of travel in the NBA under regular terms. In the sense that it’s the rule rather than exception for a team to trace a string of road games in the same week they’ll head home for a single match and be back out on the blacktop again. And not just once in a season that already runs ragged for volume of games, but often.
Out of context it’s labyrinthian, so no wonder it takes so many people on the team, broadcast, and travel sides to plan it all, to make it appear necessary, easy. How flimsy it all is — Theseus with just his twine in the Minotaur’s pitch dark Labyrinth to trace his way back out — has only come to stark clarity in the past two seasons when Covid kept teams shut up in hotels on the road last year or has, with travel “back to normal” this year, eradicated rosters in a span of two weeks.
But we want the road show. We want to see the stars we know best from TV as real-life specks moving across our own floors, squinting to make them out in the glare from our own lights. To say we saw them in person, even if it meant from a distance equivalent to 15 acres, like watching weather come in from across a field, the pressure and power of it ours to hold at arm’s length. The safety and distance of time.
A small and very heartfelt footnote for your time, sharing, feedback and support this year. Basketball Feelings grew in completely unexpected bursts and it’s never not going to be weird, wild and thrilling to me that so many of you want to read it. I know the holidays just happened but if you like what you read and want to support me a little more, you can switch to a paying subscription. From now until January 1, 2022, in this weird time limbo, you can get a 30% discount for an annual subscription, the inaugural Rasheed Wallace special.
Another great article. Very enjoyable to read, thanks.