Who's In?

Things are looking up for so many reasons since the US presidential election. It was THE competitive event in the country for the last few months. We went straight from the Olympic Games to the White House race with barely a change of intonation. There's always a little too much mindless my team-your team in electoral politics, but enough people got over it that ... OK, who am I kidding? Enough people wised up to the fact that "my team" was the right team. : )

But the results are good for two big reasons, even if you don't care for the particular winner. One, we actually got through the election event with a "clean race." That is (disregarding pre-game trash talking, mostly by the other side), no protests, no major equipment failures, no doping scandals, no Supreme Court intervention. Phew.

Better yet, there's to be a hoops player in the White House! It's felt a bit like the love of basketball has fallen off since the turn of the century. Am I wrong? Is it the retirement of Jordan? The aging of Shaq? The souring on Kobe? The winners being in the wrong market? The women's game being undermarketed? I mean, just look at the output of movies with basketball as a subtheme (a post yet to come) and you see a huge peak around 94-95, and what lately?

Maybe getting some pick-up going at the White House will bring back some luster to the game across the land. Bring out more players. (More 40+ players?) Maybe more women players, even.

This is a pretty crappy video (below), but check out 25 seconds in: There's a woman on the court.

Golly, maybe there'll be a woman on the Supreme Court after another four or eight years....

Been meaning to post this for awhile. My friend N sent me by U.S. Postal Service an article cut out of the New York Times, claiming her days as a crazy, newspaper-clipping lady were just beginning. I think it's great. I wish people would do it more. It’s somehow more endearing and idiosyncratic than being sent a link to an online story. Which is basically what I’m doing here.

The Times article was called Traveling, and Always Shooting, and told the story of Noel and Angelina Andreoni (who took the picture posted here), and their life of traipsing about the world shooting photos and baskets wherever they went. They had been working ordinary jobs in somewhat ordinary Las Vegas when they decided there had to be more to life. As the Times reports:

Angelina loved photography; Noel loved basketball. But Noel said he realized that they probably wouldn’t make a living at either. “But we can still pursue those passions,” he said. “We said, ‘Let’s get back to what we enjoy and do it.’ And because we can do it, we’ve become very good at passing that message on.”

I love the notion of a passion like that. I love the leitmotif of doing a particular activity in many and varied and unlikely places. I love the evidence that you can break out of the ordinary if you want to make it happen. I don’t love the fuzzy realization I have that I once would have craved doing what the Andreonis do, but not so much anymore … or not right now. Is it age? Or situation? Or an acceptance of dogged reality? Makes me feel like a mollusk, but I can still admire and vicariously enjoy the trip around the world with a basketball.

See more pictures on the Andreonis' website Shoot the Ball.

I recently finished reading Barak Obama’s memoir, Dreams of My Father, written in 1995. I’m prone to like the guy anyway, and the fact that he can string a few sentences together gracefully and tell a really good story endears him to me even more. As does knowing he’s a fellow hoops enthusiast, who says he played (like me) “with a consuming passion that would always exceed my limited talent.”

Here’s what he says about what he found in the game, besides friends, a self-defining attitude, and respect:

…A way of being together when the game was tight and the sweat broke and the best players stopped worrying about their points and the worst players got swept up in the moment and the score only mattered because that’s how you sustained the trance. In the middle of which you might make a move or a pass that surprised even you, so that even the guy guarding you had to smile, as if to say, “Damn…”

Every sport has its sublime moments, which share something in common, but all are shaped differently. There’s the fun of it.

(Obama only devotes two pages of his 442-page book to basketball; don’t want to give anyone the impression they should read it if they are looking for insights on the game. You should read it though, for a candid and compelling family history and surprisingly uncomfortable look at race today.)

My friend over at Hoopstips.com wrote a smart piece about Celtics' radio commentator Cedric Maxwell's recent gaffe, where he cried, "Go back to the kitchen," after a call by NBA official Violet Palmer. He apparently didn't like the call. In fact, when his co-host tried to defuse him, he went on to rant: "Go back to the kitchen and cook me some bacon and eggs!"

Part of me wants to let such crap slide, but another part says nuh-uh. If we don't take a moment to point out the idiocy of it, how's it ever going to get better? Well, Maxwell apologized in his next broadcast, but maybe shouldn't have bothered.

I tried to e-mail the parent company of the radio station he broadcasts for, but interestingly, there was no address indicated anywhere on this 21st century media company's site. But I'm sure we the audience mean the world to them. So, I took a guess at a generic address, and sent the following e-mail, borrowing conceptually from the discussion on Hoopstips.

Hello Entercom,

Not sure if anyone will get this message as I am guessing at an address. There is no apparent way of contacting anyone from your company online. Even the "contact us" page is devoid of an ombudsman's or even generic e-mail address. Nor is there anything on your "community" page to allow anyone from the "community" to say hello or give you any feedback.

I wanted to let you know how disappointed I was in the apology offered by Cedric Maxwell in his broadcast last night regarding his rude comments in a previous broadcast about referee Violet Palmer. It was the most rote and insincere sounding apology I can imagine. Almost more insulting than the original comment in its dismissive irrelevance.

I have always been fond of Maxwell as a player and anouncer. Though I thought his comments dissing Violet Palmer for a perceived bad call by saying, "Go back to the kitchen" were stupid and obnoxious, I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. People make mistakes and say dumb and insulting things that may not seem so dumb and insulting to them when they come out of their mouths. For all I know, Maxwell and Palmer are great pals and she frequently cooks him bacon and eggs. But it's totally inappropriate to say, "Go back to the kitchen and make me some bacon and eggs," or anything like that in a public forum. Unless perhaps her job just previous to being an NBA ref was as a cook and that fact were well known.

If you care about the community that you proudly claim to connect with and serve, you should make it known: that whatever people's benighted personal beliefs or bad taste in humor may be, they should not use your airwaves to spread ideas such as that certain types of people are not welcome in certain professions...

It's part of a referee's job to get criticized. Call them stupid, blind, biased, incompetent... those are, as a friend says, equal opportunity insults. Imagine other "minorities" that a ref might belong to, and conjure up equivalent derogatory "go back to the [fill in the blank]" remarks. I think they would sound pretty appalling.

I've heard that Maxwell was actually trying to imitate another notoriously ref-blasting anouncer when he made his comments... I could even buy that, since I'm familiar with the anouncer he was probably imitating. But, still, his apology should be a better recognition of how his "humor" may have been misinterpreted as representing his own real ideas or those of the people he represents. And that it could have hurt people beyond the ref in question. Would this have cost him so much?

His apology, “If I said anything that might have been insensitive or sexist in any way, then I apologize, because she has worked extremely hard to get where she is now,” being couched in the conditional, seems mostly to suggest that anyone offended by his telling a woman official to go back to the kitchen is being ridiculous. And he only apologizes IF he said "anything" (like he didn't know what it might have been?) that was insensitive or sexist. And all of that because Violet Palmer has worked hard. Not because it was a stupid thing to say or doesn't really represent his true feelings.

Something a little more substantive is in order. Not to punish Maxwell, because well, he's probably worked hard to get where he is now. And like Palmer, he does a great job with an occasional mistake. But to counter his ugly message with something that might be a useful antidote, maybe just a public service anouncement of some kind that would encourage women in sports careers. I'm reminded of a Nike ad from several years ago, which took as content statistics about girls in sports. It wasn't these stats exactly (these come from Women's Sports Jobs), but a positive message along these lines.

Girls who participate in sports get better grades and are more likely to graduate.
Girls who play sports are less likely to get pregnant at an early age.
Girls who participate in sports are less likely to use drugs or to stay in an abusive relationship.
Girls who participate in sports experience greater self-esteem, increased self confidence and a more positive body image.

Just a thought. Thanks for reading.