Taxonomies

The autonomy lost in the NBA's new player participation policy, and isolation on the coast of Northern California.

Sep 22, 2023

There’s a kind of hawk here, or maybe kestrel, as I tend to mouth the word when I see it, that glides in low, small circles over the coastal fields and then, pinning on something below, bolts its aerodynamic body vertical like it was jolting up in bed and beats its wings fast so it can hover on the spot before diving. The sightlines from the house, or anywhere, are such that you can see a good stretch of forever in any direction. The land in an undulating flatness, soft like a body lying down, so that at any given moment there are three or more of these birds visible in varying states of their flight pattern. Most of the time they don’t dive, only sit back and beat the air for a while before carrying on to coast in drifts coming up from the ocean. The honed-in flurries followed by periods of coasting feels, weirdly, like writing. Which is what I’ve come here to do.

The land here seems deceptively simple. Coastal meadows of knee high blonde grasses that glow gold or ghostly depending on the light and how much salt is drifting in the air, pocked with small yellow poppies, rounded bushes with small silver-green leaves that dot the fields like giant sleeping tortoises, small white rock roses, lone cypress trees house-height that bend in painterly and permanent windswept sharp angles, occasional vivid stands of Pepto Bismol pink belladonna lilies, spindly purple Pacific aster, stout burrs of violet thistle and then, suddenly materializing in all that, stalking great blue herons, dainty mule deer with their fawns in tow, pocket gophers that dart into one of the hundreds of holes they’ve riddled the ground with, and two cats — one, black and white I named Tuxedo and the other, a lean orange I dubbed Jeans 2.

That’s just the walk from the house down to the bluffs that demarcate land from the ocean, in case you missed it from the sound, smell or sight, rolling out past the horizon and visible from everywhere. A whole world packed into about 200 meters.

A grift I like, which I realize is actually the outcome of work and curiosity and meaningful connection, is experts in fields so much more difficult than mine that I’ve nevertheless met through mine coming to me and asking what I think about something. Martino Franchi — now ‘Marty’ to me, also a bit unbelievably — sent me a quick note at the end of last week about the NBA’s new Player Participation Policy for resting athletes. I met Marty when I was researching a three-part series I wrote for Dime, about the pandemic’s (early) effects on the league. Specifically for the first story in the series, on an uptick in soft tissue injuries and whether the abrupt return to play in the Bubble and beyond, without sufficient ramping up time, was to blame. We also worked on a story, later, for Global Sports Matters, on the catch-all term of “load management”, and how it’s never really one thing and thus hard to pin as problem or solution. He’s a biomedical researcher in Padua who specializes in functional, architectural, and molecular mechanisms of skeletal musculature to do with exercise and aging, rides a motorbike and loves classic rock. Marty rules.

I admitted I hadn’t dug into the policy yet, I’d been home for the first time in weeks for 36 hours, and was heading out again for another two weeks. Which was off for me because I kind of love deep dives into any new rules and regs the league puts forward. Not so much for the obvious or literal things they lay out, but for what’s revealed in the gaps. In what seems deceptively simple but lifts from layers of league history, its adamant taxonomies, and all the idiosyncrasies hidden in plain sight.

Being a business, one helmed by a lawyer and predicated on the erratic work of exceptional people, the hard and fasts only ever exist on paper. You can picture someone like Adam Silver, someone made deeply satisfied by sound policy, looking over new rules hot from the word doc with quiet satisfaction, almost relief, before they go out to the world and invariably begin to buckle.

Before front offices, media, fans, athletes, everyone begins to pick at and prod, to look for loopholes and inconsistencies. Because they’re there. Can easily be found when looking at the forest from the trees — the trees being the neat stipulations of rules and new policy, and the forest being the athletes, both old growth and new.

Copses of bishop pine, Monterey cypress, mature eucalyptus groves that flood your senses in air that feels bright green, and towering giant redwoods casually lining the small parking lot of the outdoor community lap pool with trunks big as cars that I lean my borrowed bike on for the hour I’m in the water.

Homemade chicken wire cages carefully wrung around baby juniper trees to keep the deer off. Clusters of California quail running over the ground, turning in tandem like shoals of fish, the punctuative feather on the top of their heads making them appear friendly, open-ended even as they hustle away. The sharp smell of pine resin softened in the sun, under salt. A loose and rangy V of sturdy brown pelicans in formation floating out over the sea under a crescent moon, sky folded in half underneath it, everything to the south settling into blue twilight while the north turns a smudging pastel gradient of crushed grape and coral.

One afternoon I walk the coast trail south for what I planned to be 10 minutes and turns, easily and barely noticing, into an hour. Scattered signposts mark the miles, some with short captions of history printed on square signs. Here’s where a ferry was smashed up against the cliffs and sunk, here’s where a Russian farmer died in a mishap, his body buried somewhere around. Another noting “this is about where the lumber mill used to be”.

The place seems so small, a pocket of remove outside even the terrestrial scope of California that it’s hard to believe so much happened here. I think of all the furrows of history in land and the lives lived on it, the lives that pass through and take small tracts with them. In the small grocery in the next town up, 15 minutes north on Highway 1, Jenner (whose own history starts in a town we drove through on the way, that her mom named her after) and I start cracking up in the bread aisle over a dumb joke that piggybacked on another joke, wound around intonation and shorthand going back almost 20 years. An older guy slows and stops to talk to us with some curiosity. I’ve been coming here for 10 years, he says a little wistfully, and I’ve never found anything that funny in the bread aisle.

Now that I’ve had time to look over the new stipulations, the most glaring thing to me and one in line with the work Marty and I did and what other experts on the subject of stress, strain, and rest on an athlete’s body have emphasized to me, is the lack of true autonomy. This is, in the opinion of people whose entire jobs it is to hypothesize, study, and test this kind of thing, the most paramount. It’s also what tends to be forfeited first in formalized policy introduced by the C-suite of pro leagues, often at the behest of team owners, and at the expense of athletes.

So, if a star athlete is cleared to play by a team’s medical staff, whether they’ve just played in a road back-to-back or are on long home stand dotted with days off, but that person feels not entirely sound, they don’t have the final say. And it goes the other way too. Sometimes it’s riskier for an athlete to be held out and come back after a few days cold, the body having become used to the routine of being “on”. If there’s a decision to rest — on a particularly star-stacked team — one person on one night so the star one notch brighter on the hierarchy won’t be out (and the team subsequently fined) during a nationally televised game, the one who wound up taking the night off could have a higher risk of injury the next game they play.

The fear of allowed autonomy — that is, freedom granted from a designated authority to a group that looks to that authority — has always been in inches. That if an inch is granted, double that will be taken, and taken advantage of. It’s rooted in history much darker, but the holdover fear as guiding principle remains.

It’ll be teams responsible for paying fines that come out of these new rules, not the players found at fault. The biggest side effect of which could be sowing mistrust between athletes and their franchises, which is not necessarily a bad thing for the league. Isolative practices are capitalism’s happiest way of holding power.

But back to bodies.

I puked twice on the drive up. Once in a willow grove off a coastal inlet called Russian Gulch, the second on an elbow bend in the highway Jenner barely had time to pull the truck into so I could jump out and dry heave into the yellow grass, back to the redwoods and front, when I finally stood up straight, still seeing stars, to the glinting Pacific and the hammered gold disk of the sun hovering at the apex where golden hour slips rapidly to sunset. The most beautiful places I’ve ever thrown up. Later, I’ll think how I earned the week. Like the physical toll, wrung out of me, was a necessary exchange for the refuge. This says a lot about me, not all of it good, I know.

The answer is a shorter season. Everyone already knows this. Even if you don’t care about implications of autonomy, you’ve probably thought to yourself that an NBA game in January doesn’t really have much juice. Is the financial reward system the league’s tied to the new in-season tournament worthwhile enough to encourage competition? Does that already feel gross to read, or is it just the free market? What happens when attention drops off after the first few games, when people who turned the tournament on to see what it was all about turn it off? Aren’t we just making new problems to throw more money at, which means more games to pay for them?

The bottom line in this new policy is revenue, and the negotiations ramping up for the league’s new media partnership deals, even if it’s being promoted as something more noble. A policy of protection for the average person buying tickets to attend that juiceless January game, like there needed to be more reasons for fans to get angry at athletes. We haven’t even felt the full sociological brunt of sports betting’s reframing games into carved up sections, chunks and scraps, meant for consumption. Personal reward tied directly to the outcomes of a game but nonetheless feel so lightly bound to the actual competition, to the actual basketball, there’s a sense it could be any player, any team, so long as legs are moving.

I wake up in the night a few times not knowing where I am. Out the window, open for the air and the sound of the waves, pinpricks of stars but otherwise a dense, furred dark. My mind doesn’t begin to reel, trying to place me, only sits still. Some primordial thing in me soothed by the rhythmic wash of the tides until my brain catches up, remembers, Right, you’re here at the corner of the continent in a state that never seems for real. An eagle drifted up from the cover of the cliffs and floated beside you today. There’s gratitude, luck, and then there’s this.

My silver lining is in the exemptions. Where an athlete, and by extension their team, can’t be punished. How loose they read in contrast to the new lines of policy, almost like prose:

Multigame absences for bona fide injury
Personal reasons
Rare and unusual circumstances
Roster management of unavailable star players
End-of-season flexibility

I trust the good teams to come up with even better rare and unusual circumstances, like I already know end-of-season flexibility is going to look and feel like the last days of school before summer break.

It’s — I learn through careful review of the Sea Ranch Check List — a white-tailed kite. The way they manage to stop midair and hover in place so characteristic to them it’s called “kiting”.

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