Picking on working stiffs

Over the course of the past ten days since Carmelo Anthony ditched Denver to join Amar’e Stoudemire as a New York Knick, sports punditry has promoted the tale that Melo’s power-move was the tipping point of some kind of shift in power from NBA ownership and management to players. As the Midwest quietly erupts in political turmoil over workers’ rights issues, this labor vs. management NBA narrative appeals to the zeitgeist, providing a feast of potential sermonizing spread before a nation of salivating sports commentators.

The hostility directed at the handful of players in the NBA powerful (read: talented) enough to actually decide in which city they want to live and work, and for whom they wish to work, has seemed at times like a Fox News conspiracy. For one thing, NBA superstars have been forcing or demanding (defensibly) self-serving trades for nearly 50 years, so reports of the league’s post-LeBron fan-unfriendliness represent an especially lazy type of preachy condescension. Sure, it sucks when your franchise player leaves a team that’s been constructed around him. For fans, it’s a huge slap in the face, and the fact that small-market teams (whose fans are often among the most passionate and devoted in the NBA) are usually the victims of superstar attrition—while glitzy destinations like New York, L.A., and Miami are the benefactors—only makes these situations more difficult to swallow.

Most columnists have sided with the owners in a thinly disguised attempt to appear sympathetic to fans (I suppose it’s an irrelevant detail that team management regulates advantageous press access). Make no mistake: it’s painful to see the foundation of your favorite franchise walk out the door. I’m a Sonics fan—I watched the most promising young roster in the league up and leave, and it rips your heart out. But we can’t expect people to act against their own wishes, no matter how much emotional energy we’ve spent rooting for them in our team’s uniform. Besides, for every Carmelo Anthony, there’s dozens of Chauncey Billupses: players (some of whom, like Billups, are also very talented) who have little control—or none at all—over where they play. As you’ve probably heard, Mr. Big Shot wanted no part of the Big Apple, preferring so emotively to stay in his hometown of Denver that the team actually apologized publicly for forcing him to change his address against his will.

But it’s a business, as jaded NBA folks are wont to repeat, and loyalty always loses out to the bottom line—although you wouldn’t know it from reading the past week’s doom-and-gloom headlines about the impending death of the league, and superstars’ callous disregard for the fans that spend their money on tickets, jerseys, and sneakers for the sake of showing their undying love and support for the best players on their teams. Obviously, nobody held a pistol to Chauncey Billups’ temple and forced him to start accepting paychecks from the New York Knicks—he could have retired luxuriously in Denver with the millions of dollars he’s been paid to play basketball. It’s not like he’s a firefighter in Wisconsin or anything. And there was nothing particularly graceful about Melo’s half-season in Denver—he awkwardly pretended he was invested in the Nuggets season though he’d openly courted a trade to New York since before the season began. But it was a calculated move on his part, and it paid off.

Players like Carmelo Anthony are worth the money they’re paid—as absurd as that may be in a world where public school teachers make less in a year than Anthony makes each time he ties his sneakers. He’s not the only one profiting off his talent (nor his relocation to a bigger media market), and he has earned every bit of his right to exercise leverage in deciding where he wants to sell his considerable brand. In a league where a number of nearly irrelevant players (Rashard Lewis, Gilbert Arenas, there are too many examples to list) earn MVP money, the privilege of a select few stars to make business decisions on their own behalf is one of the sole vestiges of a functioning economic meritocracy. If sports journalists are really as reactionary—nay, Republican—as they’ve sounded in the latest round of anti-labor opinionating, you’d think they’d appreciate the capitalistic virtue in that.

Meanwhile, NBA players will join a legion of de-pensioned union members and public employees—people whose jobs are indispensable to a functional society—on the picket lines at the end of this season. It’s a shame that most basketball fans probably understand the imminent collective bargaining stalemate in the NBA better than the current labor disputes that could permanently alter tens of thousands of American families’ financial well-being, but a certain fluency in NBA economics is now obligatory for any well-informed fan of the league. This summer, the buzzwords of labor struggle will become more important basketball terminology than shooting percentages or win shares, as multimillionaire athletes join the ranks of the proletarians. Welcome to the revolution.

Charlie Sheen and winning

If you haven’t had a chance to watch one of today’s train wreck interviews with Charlie Sheen, you’ve missed a thoroughly meme-worthy display of celebrity delusion. Sheen’s self-rationalizing arrogance functions as its own depressing commentary, but I’ll take an easy opportunity to pile on here, because more than the sordid details of Sheen’s descent into drugged isolation, I’m interested in his attitude about “winning.”

The moments of self-aggrandizing cluelessness in Sheen’s ABC interview (and they come rapid-fire) center themselves around his ideas about “winning.” Indignantly, he laughs off the suggestion that he might suffer from bi-polar syndrome, saying instead that he is “bi-winning” because “I win over here, I win over there.” Fellow celebrities’ concern for his physical and psychological wellness is likewise viewed by Sheen as a sign of “winning;” even when Mel Gibson’s name shows up on Sheen’s caller ID, he remains self-congratulatory. Mel Gibson!

It’s probably important to note that by conventional standards of celebrity achievement, Charlie Sheen is absolutely a winner (if you need any convincing, Charlie would be happy to tell you about some of the great stuff he’s done). He is the highest-paid actor on television, probably one of the richest people in Hollywood, and his show is/was inexplicably the most popular on TV—by a wide margin. He spends his free time partying in expensive hotels and having crazy group sex with porn stars. Poor guy, eh?

Sheen exhibits a kind of exceptionalism that’s probably common for people who make $2 million every time they show up to work, but he does the rest of us a favor and lays bare his fantasy-philosophy about being a “winner.” Sheen hints at a nutjob cosmology involving tiger’s blood, “Adonis DNA,” and skepticism regarding whether his own consciousness comes from this particular terrestrial plane. However, his delusions reflect nothing more than messages his sycophants—Hollywood agents, his entourage, people trying to get money/drugs from him, orgy colleagues, etc.—have been dutifully whispering in his ear for 20 years, chopped and screwed through the lens of cocaine. Keep in mind that the Church of Scientology spends millions of dollars every year telling its celebrity disciples the same thing: you are special, you are not like everyone else, and that’s why you’re on top. It’s not that hard to convince somebody that they’re exceptional—a deep part of us, easily accessible via flattery, yearns for this kind of affirmation—especially when you are already treated like royalty because millions upon millions of people watch you deliver corny punchlines on TV every week. And if you, like Sheen, are the type of person who regularly finds occasion to rail 7-gram rocks of coke in one sitting, chances are you already feel like Superman.

In a much milder, less bizarre form (which nonetheless drew nationwide scorn and disapproval on a level Charlie Sheen’s antics probably never will), we saw this kind of self-delusion on display last summer with LeBron James’ infamous “Decision.” LeBron, like Sheen, was coddled and enabled by his then-employer, the Cleveland Cavaliers. LBJ lorded over that team like the King everybody told him he was, bending the entire organization to the whims of his oversized ego. The Cavs, for their part, were only too happy to indulge LeBron’s selfishness in return for an opportunity to cash in on the King’s star power. For more on this seriously fucked-up symbiosis, I’d recommend some of Adrian Wojnarowski’s articles about the Decision and its fallout—Woj is a bit heavy-handed with his critique, but his reporting is impeccable. For Sheen’s part, it’s especially ludicrous that CBS tolerated years of dangerous irresponsibility from their star, including multiple domestic violence allegations, before finally canning him for the crime of criticizing his producer and network (there was a dose of anti-Semitism in his “criticism,” but still—the guy held a hooker hostage on a coke binge last fall and kept his job).

The initial response to LeBron James’ move was unalloyed scorn, at least outside of Miami and the FreeDarko blog. The public backlash was understandable in some cases (Cavs fans’ sense of betrayal is easy to fathom), and absurd in others (Cavs owner Dan Gilbert’s deeply hypocritical rancor triggered a karmic backfire that is still wreaking catastrophe on his team—leading scorer Antawn Jamison just went down with a fractured pinkie finger). Interestingly, LeBron himself appeared genuinely surprised by the vitriol, and for the first time in his career seemed to contemplate a version of the NBA not featuring him as its universally adored symbol of greatness.

LeBron has begrudgingly assumed a villain’s role in the league this season, and has been at his best as an aggressive, merciless takeover artist since the Heat turned their season around in December. Based on his patterns of behavior, it seems unlikely that he would wish his status as the league’s bad guy to extend past this year’s Finals (he acts like he wants some of Durant’s nice-guy currency, but Durant is sincere in a way LeBron can’t muster), but for now, he is the NBA’s #1 antagonist.

And he has been magnificent, the best player in the league this year even as he shares the ball with a second super-duper-star (Wade) and another guy who is really good at scoring (Bosh). LeBron’s angry on-court rebuttal to his perceived “haters,” whether real or imagined, has propelled his game to unprecedented heights. Derrick Rose and Dwight Howard have been superlative this year and are deserving MVP candidates, but LeBron will collect his third straight MVP trophy this spring, barring a preposterous display of vindictive editorializing on the part of voters, which is probably what will happen anyway because journalists are like that.

LeBron and his fascinating, troubling year as enfant terrible of the league have emerged as the central narrative arc of an already-legendary NBA season. Watching Charlie Sheen's interview (which is sure to suffer a similar level of overexposure as LeBron's travails), I suspect that the anger and the retributive violence the TV star exhibits towards his employer might resonate a bit with LeBron. He wouldn’t be the first athlete to use adversity as motivation, and he and Charlie Sheen wouldn’t be the first famous people to embellish the reality of their mild hardships in their own minds. At a certain level of competitive success, there just aren’t that many authentic obstacles left, and if a person has wrestled their way to the pinnacle of their field, one adversary at a time, the only options left are complacence or creativity. LeBron imagined a nation of haters whose defeat he planned with relish, even suggesting that he was keeping some kind of list of people who had tweeted unkind things about him. The last great savior of basketball, Michael Jordan, was famous for his pathological need for enemies-to-be-vanquished, real or make-believe. When he had effectively proven everybody who ever doubted him wrong, he invented feuds, mirages of adversity that managed to motivate him to even greater heights despite their origin (mostly) within his own brain. This kind of delusion made Michael Jordan into more of a basketball winner. I hope that LeBron will find a way to sustain a similar edge; it works really, really well in sports.

The problem is, it’s difficult to keep this kind of maniacal competitiveness confined to the court, and it’s a seductive—but ultimately false—structural worldview for a highly successful person. Charlie Sheen’s insistence that he’s a “winner” is kind of poignant because it’s so obvious he’s a junkie, but it’s also a little sad because in the end everybody is a loser. Death negates our successes and failures, our need for recognition and validation, our ambitions and our indolence. Sheen and others like him obviously don’t take death’s inevitability too seriously—his callous comments about a woman who nearly OD’ed at one of his parties proves he thinks his exceptionalism extends to the very edge of mortality. Obviously, he’s wrong.

Even if Two and a Half Men were an enduring work of televised art, which it is most emphatically not, Charlie Sheen’s existence would echo into the hollow void at most a little longer than yours and mine. Same with LeBron and Michael. Sure, that statue of MJ outside the United Center will last a while, and Michael Jordan will remain one of the most famous names on earth for long after I am dead and gone, but let’s not kid ourselves…I mean, how many athletes can you name from ancient Greece? How many pre-20th century athletes can you name without checking Wikipedia? In the future, when non-interplanetary athletics have become too easy for humans, basketball will be a historical footnote, and even Michael Jordan will be known only to scholars of late-20th century history.

People with an overblown sense of their own specialness—I’m thinking of Sheen arrogantly demanding a $1 million per episode raise, or “I’m taking my talents to South Beach,” or John Edwards’ entitlement looming so large over his grasp of reality that he thought he could get away with lying about his sleazy affair, or a Pope who thinks people will ignore systemic sexual abuse in the Church merely out of a sense of duty, or Qaddafi’s grotesqueries in Libya for the past four decades, or the financial executives who thought they could get away with swindling billions of dollars in ponzi schemes—wind up humbled, often more severely than most of us. Some maintain their self-deification for their entire lives, but those lives tend to be lived in states of angry distrust, imprisoned by a cultivated sense of persecution that never goes away because it is fostered by an anxious ego. Often, part of the humbling process is a dismantling of illusory enemies into a more realistic conception of life—life is not a battle. Life is not a struggle between you and your enemies. Although sports, politics, or careers can be useful as metaphors for certain aspects of life, the experience of living is not really much like sports, politics, or any other kind of professional competition. There’s nobody on the other team, not even your actual enemies—in fact, there are no teams. You don’t win or lose: you die. There’s no lesson except that we all end up in the same predicament sooner or later, and it will defeat us. The less time we waste trying to justify a narrative of “winning” or “losing,” the more time we have to enjoy our lives free of the same kind of anger that seems to have consumed Charlie Sheen.

There are a million people in the media, or on blogs, or on Twitter, or sitting in the stands of NBA games (or for that matter, playing in NBA games), who are licking their chops to squeeze every piece of celebrity gossip into a “stupid morality play,” as Deadspin recently observed after everybody decided Jay Cutler is an awful person because he couldn’t magically heal his own torn MCL on the sidelines of the NFC Championship Game—hell, I just spent 2,000 words trying to find a moral message in a couple of weird interviews with a drug addict. It’s self-evidently dumb, but it will probably never cease because sports, movies, and music seem less trivial when we connect them to our ideas about right and wrong. We fuel the flames of exceptionalism by treating celebrities and athletes like gods whose public acts are parables from which we must glean lessons—or at least promote opinions—applicable to our daily lives. Usually, these self-invented lessons are no more than affirmations of our own prejudices, but they can also serve make sports and entertainment more relatable, and perhaps sometimes more meaningful, to those of us who will never star in a TV show or play basketball in front of thousands of fans.

On an entirely different note, I would like to say that it’s somewhat refreshing to see a celebrity defiantly refusing to apologize for his reckless drug use. There is absolutely nothing else remotely “refreshing” about Charlie Sheen, but I’m glad he opted out of the “rehab, tearful apology on talk show, comeback” track so well-worn by other celebrities who’ve been caught enjoying drugs. In one of the more guileless moments of his ABC interview, he explains how awesome it was to be on a drug-fueled tear—he describes it as “epic,” refusing to take the bait on a leading question that would have allowed him to settle into a comfortable and corporate-friendly lie about how much better his life is now that he’s ostensibly kicked his drug habit. I doubt he’s permanently kicked drugs, and I doubt his life is anywhere near as full and happy as it could be if he wasn’t an addict, but at least he’s not groveling on the set of one of America’s official guilt-absolvers (Oprah, Dr. Phil, etc.). Insincere post-rehab celebrity confessionals on shows like The View ought to be examined for their contribution to adolescent drug use—if drugs are fun enough that people would put themselves through the spectacle of public shaming in front of millions of viewers and still return to the bottle, pipe, or needle, give me some drugs! Folks like Sheen use hard drugs because they simultaneously reinforce and assuage the alienation of fame. Hard drugs plunge addicts deeply into their own isolated experience, even if they’re in a room full of people partying together. For somebody like Sheen, cocaine is a great way to create, or re-create, a supercharged experience of life that makes it easier to say to one’s self, “you’re a star, baby.” The alternative is admitting that you’re just a richer, more famous version of your brother Emilio, and figuring out a way to be content with only earning $2 million per episode.

Thanks for reading, if you still are, and looking forward to some more contributions to this still-unnamed NBA blog (suggestions, please?).

Click here to see Sheen compare Frank Sinatra and Mick Jagger to “droopy-eyed, armless children”: http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/video/charlie-sheen-not-bipolar-bi-winning-13017875