Bethlehem Says

That’s what a “kibitz” is, according to Google image search. Here’s an excerpt from what it means, on GQ.com, when it’s David Roth and I gettin’ deep about the NBA Playoffs:

Shoals: You know how they say “all politics are local?” Well, all Bulls ads are local.

Roth: The thing with Rose, if I can put on my Brand Manager Cap (it has earflaps!) for a moment, is that the Chicago connection works for him. LeBron is from no-place at this point. Spiritually, he has apparently always been from a gated community near Miami. I think you’re right that the thing that works about the Rose commercial, and maybe doesn’t work for you about Rose, is that he seems to mean it—it feels like he cares because I guess he’s repping his stuff. All the best sneaker commercials have that. There was a Melo one in Baltimore I remember really well that way, with a creepy cameo by a nodding Jim Boeheim.

Shoals: “His stuff”. That sounds like you are saying he’s earnest about his balls.

Next week, the Finals!

Are we missing another angle on the Joakim Noah hate speech story? When Noah proved himself as a player and earned everyone’s respect, he relaxed, stopped trying so hard, and felt comfortable being himself. His boho goofiness became endearing, his manner less forced—and, most notably, Noah stopped coming off as jock-poseur. There’s no other way to put it. Noah is a cosmopolitan weirdo with bits and pieces of the whole wide world in his personality. All too often at Florida, though, it seemed like he was trying hard to conform to what he thought being a star athlete was all about. That meant approximating machismo, and confusing attitude with intensity. The irony of it was that, as transparent as this posturing was, it also called his quirkier qualities into question. Noah told Kevin Arnovitz, convincingly, that gay slurs aren’t who he is, aren’t what he’s about, and so on. It’s not cant, and Arnovitz knows it. But you have to wonder how much this incident may, after all, still be about Noah. His biography backs up his claims of tolerance. At the same time, it reminds you how Noah, without thinking and perhaps out of insecurity, can fall into behavior that obscures the real him. It’s not hard to read between the lines of Noah’s predicament, and see a kind of “queerness” there. Certainly, this does not bode well for the proverbial gay NBA player, for whom this problem is more than a metaphor.  

I have to be careful what I say about Derrick Rose. My opinions on him are heterodox, stubborn, and probably relevant to no one but myself. Basketball is sometimes best kept to one’s self, like shit you tell your therapist or your cat. However, today something dawned on me: How much of the Rose-for-MVP narrative is about him being the anti-LeBron? Derrick Rose has emerged as the Good Son figure, over the summer, Kevin Durant was being groomed for. Oh high irony, that Rose was there, all along, in Durant’s shadow in Turkey. Now Rose is everybody’s favorite player, a new kind of point guard, and the flash point for the stats vs. gut war that I though the NBA got over before it started. Rose can seemingly do no wrong—if he’s less than perfect, well, damn it, he deserves credit for improving or trying. Durant, on the other hand, is looking less like a transformative figure, and more a very tall, classic SF who scores a lot for a very good team.

I wonder, though, if the Chicago-ness of Rose gets in the way of his filling this (prophetic) role in quite the same way Durant was meant to. Durant could belong to everyone because, in a sense, OKC as a basketball town remains a work in progress. Especially to the outsider looking in. LeBron was a league-wide villain; Durant was ideally positioned to counter that, showing great faith to a small market that, to many, was more symbolic than anything else. Rose’s South Side story perhaps gives him an even closer bond to the team, but it also makes him much more the the property of that city, those fans. And let’s not forget, Rose came to the Bulls a decade after Jordan left, with some good, if ultimately disappointing teams, in between. Chicago can’t help but be in the equation; Chicago may also be standing in the way of Rose’s ecumenical appeal. Rose couldn’t possibly be more adored, and yet who is he fighting for: NBA fans writ large, or the Bulls, who will then make converts of the world just like they did under Jordan?