Bethlehem Says

At GQ.com: Congratulations, Mavericks. What does it all mean?

With last night’s win, the Mavs become the sixteenth NBA franchise, accounting for relocation, to win a title. It’s a select club, to be sure, but the Mavs aren’t the Lakers or Celtics, or Pistons, or the Rockets, or even the Hawks, who made the Finals four times between 1957 and 1961, and took it all in 1958. They are one of the seven teams with only one championship to their name. Franchises that have never hoisted the banner can still be perfectly respectable, and some fairly miserable teams have one seemingly random title to their name. The real question to ask, then, is what kind of championship was this, anyway?

This transmission marks the end of my GQ playoffs blog. It’s been real.

Dirk Nowitzki: A Simple Chair, ROLU
via rolustudio.com
Dirk has never been the biggest fan of furniture, but he would probably relate to the austere, but vibrant, qualities of this chair. We also want to imagine him sleeping in this chair as well, with a nighttime routine that consists of him merely sitting down and closing his eyes.

(more at GQ.com, from Kyle Garner of Sit and Read and Justin Sullivan. Thanks for ruining my Eames for me!)

Brian Phillips, that Run of Play fellow, drops by GQ.com to love the way Jason Kidd moves:

Chris Paul, Steve Nash, even Derrick Rose when he’s charting his own route to the basket—these guys give you the sense that being a point guard means having the freedom to do math in space. Watching them, you’re plotting the vectors of moving objects with the holograms in your head. With Kidd, you get the sense that playing the point means diving into some nether-realm where no one else can go … He’s 6-foot-4, and he plays like he’s three feet underground.

There’s more where that came from!

pitchersandpoets:

Eric wrote about Caron Butler’s yearning and the irrelevance of sidekicks (Butler himself, especially) for GQ.com. 

I write everywhere: GQ.com NBA Finals preview/Good Men Project piece on those talkin’ basketballs/GQ slideshow on sports streaks.

Last night I saw Steve James’s latest, The Interrupters. Predictably, it’s hard, well-done, and raises as many questions as it answers, which is the point with his films. In one scene, a 17 year-old recently released from prison goes back to the scene of an armed robbery to apologize to his victims. No one comes away feeling good about the meeting; it’s hardly what you might call “redemption”, or a feel-good scene. But it brings some closure, and allows everyone involved to concentrate on fixing the present, instead of remaining stalled in the past. It’s a time-honored technique, as is the one-on-one moderating that Chicago’s CeaseFire uses to head off confrontations before they escalate into violence. But when most of the city’s murders are, as the film notes, interpersonal and not gang-related (structural) in nature, this approach makes sense. No matter how obvious it may seem. Well, obvious once you get moderators out in the neighborhoods whose own checkered pasts gives them the authority, and access, to intervene.

It is totally inappropriate of me to stick Rick Reilly in a post about teen violence and making the world a better place. But if The Interrupters showed that on-site penance is powerful even if we see it coming, we might have to make an exception for journalism. Early last week, I guess, Reilly wrote about how the Heat are proving everyone, including him, wrong. He reiterated all the times he, and others, had bagged on Miami, before eating some crow, reveling in it, and comparing this “I told you so” to other times it’s happened. Somehow, though, it seems inadequate. It’s one thing to commit a crime and then go back, two years later; that’s two singular occasions, equal and parallel, separated by time and toll. Reilly’s mea culpa is more like those after-the-fact corrections in print media, or the Republican strategy of lying, then maybe recanting once the news cycle has had a chance to disseminate falsehood.

I am by no means equating the Heat with politics or urban problems. The substance of Reilley’s column (ugh), though, goes well beyond being right or wrong about the outcome of sporting matches, and crosses over into truth and fairness—not so different from someone confronting the consequences of his past behavior. Reilly is looking, in one fell column, to make up for everything he and his right-seeming colleagues have said this season. Months and months and months of it. It shouldn’t be so easy. For this to be genuine, or mean a thing, Reilly needs to log just as many “oops” pieces. Of course, he’s hoping that things will turns around after one game of the series, so he can go back to his old ways. Otherwise, if the Heat have made him “eat crow” or “told him so”, is it any more than a technicality for him to acknowledge so? Was Reilly wrong and full of shit all along, or is he just inescapably out of step with the news-cycle for the time being?

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!