Still, four or five of “my guys” were oddly enthusiastic about my Pyramid of Success, and that was enough to kill (or at least scare) most of our early season opponents. But what I kept noticing was that the other fifteen kids on my squad didn’t care if we won or lost. They didn’t seem to care about anything, really, or at least nothing that had an application to baseball. I couldn’t tell what they found more excruciating: when they didn’t get to play (because sitting on the bench was boring), or when they had to play (because that meant another two strikeouts and an hour of praying that no fly balls would be hit in their general direction). In fact, some of “my guys” started complaining to their mothers. And near the end of June, I was told to attend the next Wyndmere Park Board meeting for a “free-form discussion about my coaching style.”
Now, it should be noted that Wyndmere didn’t really need a park board, because Wyndmere doesn’t have a park. Wyndmere does have the Rock Garden (not a rock garden, but the Rock Garden), which is a stone enclosure that’s as big as a city block and augmented by a forty-foot replica of a Scottish castle (it also has a basketball court and several uncomfortable picnic tables). When, who, or why the Rock Garden was built remains a mystery on par with Stonehenge, so living in Wyndmere always made you feel a little like Leonard Nimoy on In Search Of. And what’s even crazier is that the Wyndmere Park Board had no clear jurisdiction over the Wyndmere Rock Garden; the Wyndmere Park Board seemed to exclusively serve as a legislative body for Little League athletics. When the secretary read the minutes from the May meeting, the only item was, “Board approves motion to hire Chuck Klosterman as baseball coach.”
Now, had I only been meeting with the actual park board members, I suspect the whole affair would have gone smoothly: I would have outlined my goal-oriented mission statement and expressed deep affinity for the future of “my guys,” and I would have exited the meeting with nothing more than a gentle reminder to keep everyone’s best interest in mind. I have no problem pretending to be conciliatory if the ends justify the means. Unfortunately, a few mothers showed up at the meeting that night as well. And—as we all know—there is nothing more frustrating than a mother who cares about her children.
Predictably, these were the mothers of kids who really had no interest in baseball, or in sports, or in competing against other children in any meaningful way. And that’s fine; these kids were great people (possibly), and have gone on to fine careers (perhaps) and wonderful families (I assume). There’s nothing admirable about having the kind of killer instinct that always felt normal to a weirdo like me. I mean, these little guys didn’t want to spend two months chasing a stupid leather sphere through the stupid green grass in stupid right field; they just wanted to do something that kept them under the radar until they got to tenth grade, when they could quit pretending they cared about sports and start listening to Replacements cassettes. I’m sure my guys would have loved youth soccer.
But ANYWAY, suffice it to say the mothers of these kids didn’t see it that way. They seemed to believe their sons actually adored baseball and were being discriminated against, apparently for being crappy baseball players. I decided to prove them wrong by grabbing a dictionary and reciting the exact Webster definition of “discrimination,” which inadvertently proved their point entirely. But—somehow—this still felt like a draw. Their second argument was that I was setting a bad example by starting the same nine kids in every game, and that the starters should either be selected randomly or alphabetically; I argued that this was like giving every student the same grade on a test no matter how many questions they answered correctly (not a flawless analogy, I realize, but I was always good at rhetorical misdirection). They went on to propose that every player should get to try every position over the course of the season, a suggestion I deemed “unprofessional.” And when they finally demanded that I had to stop keeping score and that I needed to play every future contest as an exhibition, I casually made the kind of statement sixteen-year-olds should not make to forty-six-year-old Midwestern housewives: “Why are you telling me how to do my job?” I asked. “It’s not like I show up in your kitchen and tell you when to bake cookies.”
In my defense, I did not mean to imply that these women were only suited for cookie-oriented purposes, and I was fully aware that the particular person I told this to worked in a bank (which actually might have made things worse). My statement was to be taken at face value and as a point of fact. However, the park board found this “exchange of ideas” rather damaging to my case and immediately adopted all of the mothers’ suggestions, all of which I unabashedly ignored in our very next game (a 16–6 drubbing of our hated rivals from Fairmount). When I jumped into my father’s pickup truck after the contest, I noticed an envelope under the windshield wiper: I had been terminated for “insubordination.” This did not strike me as an especially brave way to fire a sixteen-year-old, but I knew that was how the industry operated; one year later, the same thing would happen to Tom Landry.
Now, perhaps you’re curious as to how my ill-fated experience as a baseball coach has anything to do with my maniacal distaste for soccer; on the surface, probably nothing. But in that larger, deeper, “what-does-it-all-mean?” kind of way, the connection is clear. What those anti-cookie-baking mothers wanted me to do was turn baseball into soccer. They wanted a state-sponsored Outcast Culture. They wanted to watch their kids play a game where their perfect little angels could not fuck up, and that would somehow make themselves feel better about being parents.
Soccer fanatics love to tell you that soccer is the most popular game on earth and that it’s played by 500 million people every day, as if that somehow proves its value. Actually, the opposite is true. Why should I care that every single citizen of Chile and Iran and Gibraltar thoughtlessly adores “futball”? Do the people making this argument also assume Coca-Cola is ambrosia? Real sports aren’t for everyone. And don’t accuse me of being the Ugly American for degrading soccer. That has nothing to do with it. It’s not xenophobic to hate soccer; it’s socially reprehensible to support it. To say you love soccer is to say you believe in enforced equality more than you believe in the value of competition and the capacity of the human spirit. It should surprise no one that Benito Mussolini loved being photographed with Italian soccer stars during the 1930s; they were undoubtedly kindred spirits. I would sooner have my kid deal crystal meth than play soccer. Every time I pull up behind a Ford Aerostar with a “#1 Soccer Mom” bumper sticker, I feel like I’m marching in the wake of the Khmer Rouge.
That said, I don’t feel my thoughts on soccer are radical. If push came to shove, I would be more than willing to compromise: It’s not necessary to wholly outlaw soccer as a living entity. I concede that it has a right to exist. All I ask is that I never have to see it on television, that it’s never played in public (or supported with public funding), and that nobody—and I mean nobody—ever utters the phrase “Soccer is the sport of the future” for the next forty thousand years. Outcasts may grow up to be novelists and filmmakers and computer tycoons, but they will never be the athletic ruling class. Your hopeless dystopia shall never befall us, Mr. Pelé. Now get back in that Aerostar and return to the killing fields.
1. And losing to Poland!
2. And also Jake Gyllenhaal.
3. My statistically obsessed compadre Jon Blixt once made a brilliant deduction about World Cup soccer: It must be a nightmare for gamblers. “I cannot comprehend how casinos could set the point spread for these games, as it appears the favored nation wins every single match—yet never by a margin of more than a single goal,” he wrote me while watching Italy defeat Bulgaria 2–1 in a 1994 World Cup semifinal, a contest that was immediately followed by Brazil’s 1–0 win over Sweden. “Perhaps they only bet the over-under, which must always be 2 1/2.”
On the last day of May in 2002, the Los Angeles Lakers defeated the Sacramento Kings in the sixth game of the Western Conference Finals in one of the worst officiated games in recent memory (the Lakers sho
t a whopping twenty-seven free throws in the fourth quarter alone, and Kings guard Mike Bibby was whistled for a critical phantom foul after Kobe Bryant elbowed him in the head).
Obviously, this is not the first time hoop zebras have cost someone a game. However, people will always remember this particular travesty, mostly because the game was publicly protested by former Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader.
“Unless the NBA orders a review of this game’s officiating, perceptions and suspicions, however presently absent any evidence, will abound,” wrote the semi-respected consumer advocate in a letter to NBA commissioner David Stern. “A review that satisfies the fans’ sense of fairness and deters future recur-rences would be a salutary contribution to the public trust that the NBA badly needs”
“As usual, Nader’s argument is only half right. Were the Kings jammed by the referees? Yes. Was Game Six an egregious example of state-sponsored cheating? Probably. But this is what sets the NBA apart from every other team sport in North America: Everyone who loves pro basketball assumes it’s a little fixed. We all think the annual draft lottery is probably rigged, we all accept that the league aggressively wants big market teams to advance deep into the playoffs, and we all concede that certain marquee players are going to get preferential treatment for no valid reason. The outcomes of games aren’t predeterminedor scripted, but there are definitely dark forces who play with our reality. There are faceless puppetmasters who pull strings and manipulate the purity of justice. It’s not necessarily a full-on conspiracy, but it;’s certainly not fair. And that’s why the NBA remains the only game that matters: Pro basketball is exactly like life.
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Every time I watch a Spike Lee movie on HBO, I get nervous. That probably happens to a lot of white people, and I suppose that’s sort of the idea. But my reason for getting nervous has nothing to do with the sociocultural ideas that Spike expresses, nor does it have anything to do with fear that a race riot is going to break out in my living room, nor is it any kind of artistic apprehension. My fear is that I know there’s a 50 percent chance a particular situation is going to occur on screen, and the situation is this: A black guy and a white guy are going to get into an argument over basketball, and the debate will focus on the fact that the black guy loves the Lakers and the white guy loves the Celtics. And this argument is going to be a metaphor for all of America, and its fundamental point will be that we’re all unconsciously racist, because any white guy who thought Larry Bird was the messiah is latently denying that Jesus was black. The relative blackness and whiteness of the Los Angeles Lakers and the Boston Celtics (circa 1980–1989) is supposed to symbolize everything we ever needed to know about America’s racial cold war, and everyone who takes sports seriously seems to concede that fact.
But this metaphor is only half the equation.
To say the 1980s rivalry between the Celtics and the Lakers represents America’s racial anguish is actually a shortsighted understatement. As I have grown older, it’s become clear that the Lakers-Celtics rivalry represents absolutely everything: race, religion, politics, mathematics, the reason I’m still not married, the Challenger explosion, Man vs. Beast, and everything else. There is no relationship that isn’t a Celtics-Lakers relationship. It emerges from nothingness to design nature, just as Gerald Henderson emerged from nothingness to steal James Worthy’s errant inbound pass in game two of the 1983 finals. Do you realize that the distance between Henderson and Worthy at the start of that play—and the distance between them at the point of interception—works out to a ratio of 1.618, the same digits of Leonardo da Vinci’s so-called “golden ratio” that inexplicably explains the mathematical construction of the universe?1 Do not act surprised. It would be more surprising if the ratio did not.
Am I Serious?
Yes. How could I not be? For ten years—but for only ten years—you had two teams that were (a) clearly the class of their profession, and (b) completely and diametrically opposed in every possible respect. This is no accident. For at least one decade, God was obsessed with pro basketball. And as I stated earlier, everyone always wants to dwell on the fact that (a) the Celtics started three Caucasians in a league that was 80 percent black and (b) the Lakers never had a white player who mattered (the only exception being Kurt Rambis, a role player who seemed artless on purpose, going so far as refusing to purchase contact lenses). But what made this rivalry so universal was that it wasn’t about black and white people; it was about black and white philosophies. Americans have become conditioned to believe the world is a gray place without absolutes; this is because we’re simultaneously cowardly and arrogant. We don’t know the answers, so we assume they must not exist. But they do exist. They are unclear and/or unfathomable, but they’re out there. And—perhaps surprisingly—the only way to find those answers is to study NBA playoff games that happened twenty years ago. For all practical purposes, the voice of Brent Musburger was the pen of Ayn Rand.
Perhaps you’re curious as to why we must go back two decadesto do this; obviously, pro basketball still exists. The answer is simple: necessity. I mean, you certainly can’t understand the world from the way the NBA is now. Two years ago, I watched an overtime game between the Philadelphia 76ers and the Toronto Raptors: Allen Iverson scored 51 points and Vince Carter scored39. As I type those numbers into my keyboard, it looks like I’m painting the portrait of an amazing contest (and exactly the kind of mano-a-mano war NBC wanted to show me on a Sunday afternoon). But it was an abortion. It was like watching somebody commit suicide with a belt and a folding chair. Iverson took 40 shots; Carter was 15 for 36 from the field. It was like those excruciating NBA games from the late 1970s, where collapsing super-novas such as World B. Free and John Williamson would shoot the ball on every possession and David Thompson would try to score 70 points against the New Orleans Jazz before blowing two weeks’ pay on Colombian nose candy. Guys like Iverson and Carter are mechanically awesome, but they don’t represent anything beyond themselves. They’re nothing more than good basketball players, and that’s depressing. Watching modern pro basketball reminds me of watching my roommate play Nintendo in college. In order to remedy this aesthetic decline, the league decided to let teams play zone defense, which has got to be the least logical step ever taken to increase excitement. This is like trying to combat teen pregnancy by lowering the drinking age.
The NBA doesn’t need to sanction zone defense; the smart guys were playing zone when it was still illegal. Larry Bird played zone defense every night of his career. What the NBA needs to do is provide a product that will help us better understand ourselves and foster self-actualization. Granted, this is not an easy goal to legislate. But that’s the only solution that can save this dying brachiosaurus. I didn’t need Michael Jordan to come back; I need to watch a game that tells me who to vote for.
Here’s what I mean: I never understood partisan politics until I watched the last epic Lakers-Celtics war, which happened in the summer of 1987. The contest everyone remembers is game four, which I watched as a high school sophomore at a summer basketball camp on the campus of North Dakota State University. You probably remember this game, too: It’s June 9 at the Boston Garden, and the Lakers lead the series 2–1. Boston has the ball with under thirty seconds left, down one; they dump it to McHale on the right block, who kicks it out to Ainge, who reverses to Bird in the far corner for a three. Twine. Celtics by two. The Lakers come down on offense and Kareem gets hacked; he makes one and misses the second, but it bounces off Parish and goes out of bounds under the rack. Magic takes the in bounds pass, blows by McHale and hits that repulsive running hook across the lane. Lakers lead by one. After the obligatory timeout moves the rock to halfcourt, the Celtics have two seconds to get a shot. Bird’s forty-footer is dead-on, but two inches deep. L.A. wins 107–106; they go up three games to one and win the rings five days later.
This, of course, was like a ten-inch stiletto jammed into my aorta. Magic Johnson is one of my favorite players of all ti
me, but I hate him. I once interviewed Johnson about all those stupid, civic-minded, state-of-the-art movie theaters he’s putting into depressed urban areas, and I was caught between feeling impressed by his suit, nervous about his stature, and overcome by the desire to punch him in the face. However, my personal feeling toward Earvin can’t negate the larger meaning of his heroics, and that meaning is political. Because what I really remember most about that game was that I was just about the only kid at this camp who wanted Boston to win. The only other people who liked the Celtics were the camp’s coaches; I was the only Bird apostle under the age of thirty-five. If you liked the Celtics, it meant you liked your dad’s team. And this is when I came to understand that I was actually rooting for the Republican party.
Regardless of how liberal Massachusetts may seem, the Celtics were totally GOP. Like Thomas Jefferson, K. C. Jones did not believe in a strong central government: The Celtic players mostly coached themselves. They practiced when they felt like practicing and pulled themselves out of games when they deemed it appropriate, and they wanted to avoid anything taxing. They wanted to avoid taxes. And they excelled by attacking the world in the same way they had been raised to understand it: You pick-and-roll, you throw the bounce pass, you make your free throws. If it worked in the 1950s, it can work now. Meanwhile, the Lakers were like late sixties Democrats: They seemed liberal and exhilarating, but Pat Riley controlled the whole show. There were no state’s rights within the locker room of the Fabulous Forum. Government was seen as the answer to all problems, including the problem of keeping Robert Parish off the offensive glass. Riley was a tyrant—a dashing tyrant, but a tyrant nonetheless—and arguably the strongest singular governing force since LBJ. I once heard an apocryphal story about Lyndon Johnson and a military helicopter: After addressing some Vietnam-bound troops, he was supposed to get on a chopper and leave the Air Force base, so one of his sycophants asked him, “Sir, which of these helicopters is yours?” Johnson supposedly said, “Son, all these helicopters are mine.” That’s how Riley looked at James Worthy.
Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto Page 11