BottenFieldofDreams wrote:I don't believe I've stripped KD of any basic humanity in forming my opinions.
A lot of the narrative surrounding KD, and LeBron before him with The Decision, does exactly that. Remember there was a book called "The Whore of Akron" about LeBron by a bitter Cleveland fan? Remember them burning his jerseys? Same for Durant. Same for Wayne Rooney and Everton up to a year ago--one sign in the stands read "Once A Blue/Now A Red/In Our Hearts/You Are Dead."
There's a fascinating book by Yago Colas, a prof at U MIchigan called "Ball Don't Lie" in which he explores myths about basketball. The Myth of The Right Way (racializes analysis and insists that The Right Way ((Larry Brown)) is not just pragmatic for winning games but morally superior to the Wrong Way ((Allen Iverson)) ), The Myth of Invention (basketball did not spring from Naismith, fully formed, on a single day in 1891), and so on. It culminates with The Myth Of The Man in Chapter 9. It deals with how people treated LeBron* post-Decision. Remember, the Cavs owner called him a traitor, sold his posters on the Cavs site for $17.41 (the year of Benedict Arnold's birth), cited LeBron's "cowardly betrayal." Sean Conboy: "In a world of attention whores, The King has ascended to the throne." Maureen Dowd: "It's usually women who get accused of needing to go places (the bathroom) in groups." They said coward, mercenary, traitor, and all sorts of other things about Lebron while with their words trying to take away his dignity and his masculinity. In "The Whore of Akron": "LeBron did the same thing as any trollop worth her taxi fare: he made the right noises, told us how good it felt, how big we were, how he loved us, how special we were. Oh, we knew...that he was only a child, and a child born unto a hapless mother more or less a child herself. His vast sense of childish entitlement seemed to speak louder every season. But lord, the sex ws fine." That's a grown man basically saying the city is a john and LeBron is an underage hooker
using that analogy to paint LeBron as the immature one. He's also accusing LeBron of entitlement issues, without a hint of irony as he, a native of #Believeland expressing an entitlement to James he did not deserve, wrote those words.
Colas writes, in "Ball Don't Lie" about what these criticisms of James (and Durant, and Rooney, and others) mean:
Specifically, the Myth of the Man comprises four sets of tropes of masculinity that its adherents accuse James of violating: (1) the Sports Man (tropes that equate a narrow definition of sportsmanship with an equally narrow definition of masculinity and exclude James from both), (2) the Grown Man (tropes that explain James's decision in terms of immaturity, childishness, or failure in other ways to be an adult man), (3) the Noble Man (tropes that identify masculinity with a code of honor associated with nobility and then exclude James from both), (4) the Man's Man (tropes that associate James's decision with female stereotypes.)
People are doing the same thing with Durant. And they're doing it because they consider it audacious for a professional player to use the autonomy of his own personal free agency.
*LeBrron is a guy who has been under a microscope since he was 16 and has a spotless record of public behavior and on-court performance yet who is constantly referred to, up to and including in my bar, as a "little b***h" solely because he dared change teams one time. Durant is a guy who has been under a microscope since 18 and who gave a million bucks to a OK town that got blitzed by a tornado and who has a similarly sterling on- and off-court reputation as a teammate and a guy.
, is it just me or does that Lonzo or whatever his name is (the Lakers kid) have a really weird looking shot, almost starts at his belly? Man, he will get that slapped away a lot. Or maybe he is more of a passer than a shooter. No idea, other than I hear his dad thinks he's the best.