this is a basketball thread

BGwaves wrote:Life is so fragile.

I haven't cared about basketball in a long time, and I pretty much wrote this guy off back in what, 04? when he was having his "legal trouble". But I felt a chill of panic when I heard, because of this. Just the randomness. A young, healthy, rich, famous guy, almost an institution himself, suddenly gone.

I mean, nothing groundbreaking here, it just struck me.

He's raping the angels, now. RPI!!!

I've seen a lot of reactions similar to the above and I find it beyond sanctimonious. I feel like the implication to a lot of these criticisms has been that people who are mourning the loss of someone who meant a lot to them -- for a whole lot of reasons, both banal and otherwise -- are somehow complicit. I find that really unsettling, to be honest. Of course I think the allegations (as well as the really aggressive and fucked up legal strategy he was comfortable with adopting) should be mentioned in any retrospective about his life and it absolutely should put a huge asterisk on his legacy. But to completely dismiss the impact that he had on people's lives, especially young people of color growing up in Los Angeles, is pretty wild to me. RIP Mamba.

Now THIS is absolutely heartbreaking

https://slate.com/culture/2020/01/gianna-gigi-bryant-was-a-great-basketball-player.html
“The best thing that happens is when we go out and fans will come up to me, and she’ll be standing next to me. And they’ll be like, ‘Man, you gotta have a boy. You and V gotta have a boy, man, have somebody carry on your tradition, the legacy.’ And she’s like, ‘Oy, I got this. You don’t need no boy for that. I got this.” And I’m like, ‘That’s right. Yes you do. You got this .’ ”

My initial thought when I heard this news was “you know what was really sad? When Roberto Clemente, a hero and non rapist died in a plane crash.”
But then I thought better of expressing that thought, mainly because I don´t want to begrudge somebody for their grief. I do think that rape victims seeing this man lauded as a hero can very understandably take it as a slap in the face from a world that continues to give zero fucks about them, so yeah, I pozzed the shit out of Zappo´s post.

Anyway, real point I was trying to make was that this article made me cry. It´s super fucking damn sad.

If it makes you feel any better, WP, I can assure you that you'll somehow endure just how awful this whole situation is for you, personally. I promise.

More seriously, though, I was genuinely bothered by the 10-15 minutes of sports radio that I listened to, yesterday. I cannot remember who it was (possibly Scoop Jackson's dumb ass...?), but somebody literally praised Bryant for "yes, I'll go there, being a true family man by stepping up and saving his marriage when the whole world was against him." Like...man, that is a fucked up take regardless of how raw the nerve is.

I don't expect nuanced talk radio takes within the first 10 hours (especially with the C-team on Sundays), of course, but that struck me as a pretty offensive way to frame it. Yesterday, today, or tomorrow. Fucked up!

Yikes.

Kept waiting for someone to so much as vaguely allude to that whole thing and maybe that's what today's for.

Who are the top 5 basketball players of all time? This is regardless of position.

When I was a kid I was into baseball before any other sports and I very easily developed a sense of who the best baseball players were (by position, actually), even if I'd never seen them play. I'd never seen Babe Ruth play, but I was sure that he was one of the best outfielders. Same with Willie Mays and Hank Aaron. Same with pretty much every other position!

When it comes to basketball, I'm totally unable to just inherit such knowledge from the past and take it as a fact. No amount of stats or a list of accolades is enough to fully convince me of the greatness of players like Oscar Robertson, Wilt Chamberlain or Jerry West. I'm not saying I don't believe they were great, I just never saw them with my own eyes and I can't 100% believe that their accomplishments weren't due in some part to the eras they played in just not being as competitive as basketball would later become. Maybe this is bullshit, I don't know. I try to watch clips of them on YouTube and it's hard to really evaluate them from that, I mean you're just watching all their best plays and greatest moments, not necessarily a truly honest sample of the players they usually were night in and night out.

Michael Jordan and LeBron James are the only two players I'm 100% confident putting on a list like that.

Was Kareem Abdul-Jabbar a top 5 all-time player? He's the all time scoring champ. Yet he's still not regarded as the face of the Lakers (maybe because he played six seasons in Milwaukee). Has it been decided that neither Magic nor Bird, despite holding down the entirety of the 1980s, really were top 5 players?

Wilt Chamberlain... I've never seen this guy play, he scored a lot of points, that's for sure.

Is Kobe Bryant a top 5 NBA player? I checked out from watching basketball altogether from about 1999 to 2007 or so (this was part post-Bulls hangover, part circumstances in my life that made routinely watching TV much less convenient than it used to be). I missed out on his prime and much like those players from the 60s and 70s, I'm kind of forming my ideas about his legacy from other people's opinions.

zappo wrote:If it makes you feel any better, WP, I can assure you that you'll somehow endure just how awful this whole situation is for you, personally.  I promise.

I really like you, Zappo, but you have a tendency in these exchanges to come off like a young Bill Hicks, which I find incredibly fucking irritating.

^There's no way Zappo takes that as anything but a compliment

I don't know who Bill Hicks is, young or old, but if he is or was at one time anti-rapist then Michael K is right: I'm glad to come across like him.

Thanks for fighting the good fight Zappo. My girlfriend is a rape victim and her experience severely fucked up her life. Seeing the entire internet explode for a rapist propped up as hero and idolized was throwing her into a deep depressive episode and she was crying tonight while we talked and I tried to comfort her. She told me that literally nobody gives a shit about rape victims, and it was nice to be able to say that my buddy on an unknown internet message board stashed away in some corner of the internet at least gave a shit.

zappo wrote:I don't know who Bill Hicks is, young or old, but if he is or was at one time anti-rapist then Michael K is right: I'm glad to come across like him.

This is really surprising. I'm not entirely sure what WP is after here - and, fwiw, I'd probably strike the balance between your tones. Seeing the changes in Kobe Bryant's disposition post-retirement and seeing him as a loving father, it's hard for me to not feel some sort of tenderness at his passing. But that change in disposition is a privilege he was afforded by his wealth, fame, and especially a canny legal team that allowed him to slither out of a sentence that would have - and should have - ruined his life and reputation. - but Bill Hicks was a comedian in the countercultural vein of George Carlin and Richard Pryor. There's a love for humanity captured in his work though, and I think best embodied by this:

Don't give me too much credit, Ned.  I appreciate the support, but I'm not fighting any fight, relatively speaking, let alone the good one.  The (unfortunate?  I don't know...this might be a "good" thing, once again speaking relatively) reality is that Kobe Bryant is many things at the same time--just like the rest of us, though obviously in different ways and on an incomparably different scale.  Some of those things are enough to make your skin crawl, but it is worth remembering that some of them are the good kind of hair-raising, too.  He did a lot of good, too.  It's tough to admit, but it's true.  Other notable monsters who changed the world for the better include John Lennon, Walter Payton, and Michael Jordan.  I, too, have done (and more often said) truly awful and arguably unforgivable things in addition to, I hope, doing much more good than harm to the world and people around me, on balance.

I'm very much anti-Kobe Bryant, whatever that means and in large part (but not exclusively, I have to admit) because of the rape situation.  That's true.  And I do have "pretty strong feelings" about these matters.  But let's be real--I was just being predictably snarky because WP was being predictable in taking a handful of examples and drawing sweeping conclusions about them and their speakers.  I probably do sound like this Bill Hicks guy!  But just like I hope I'm now at least partly demonstrating (and as I'm equally/maybe even more sure WP would, outside the bounds of a single, probably off-handed message board post which obviously cannot possibly contain and communicate every nuance of his feelings), there's more to it, to me, and to "my take" than "RPI RAPEMAN FUCKK YOU."

But that's definitely in there, yeah!  No point in denying it.  My very first reaction was, "Kobe Bryant isn't dead, fuck off."  My immediately subsequent one was, "Good."  It's true. Like Kobe before me, I'm only human. For worse as well as better.

And I definitely thought of this quite imperfect but still valuable, if you ask me, piece after only a few more minutes had gone by.

https://deadspin.com/why-the-fuck-isnt-kobe-bryant-a-pariah-yet-1829494689

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