A Brooklyn Culture Mafia

[IdleRich]

shot hoops in our driveway for hours as a kid. what's also great is you can play half-court games with whatever you have: one on one, two on two. I think three on three half court is my fav, always for better passing. when I was in high school, we'd play three on three games on a court at a park nearby a couple of nights a week in the summer.

Yeah with footie the game I love to play is, I guess, 5-a-side, more than the full 11. But down to 3 v 3 can just about work on the right pitch, even 2 v 2.
On your own you're just down to practising skills I guess... still fairly rewarding, I'm knda like Ronaldinho if you've ever seen that.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

surely american football culture has got to be the worst across all major american sports though

yeah probably - it has the clearest cultural divide between management and players

but the NBA's wokeness is textbook woke capitalism - NBA management has always been the savviest there, probably due in no small part to being the first league to have to reckon with selling a majority black league to a majority white fanbase. I strongly suspect if you dug into its business connections they'd be roughly similar to the NFL's in terms of hideous people or entities its in business with. and the political donations of owners overwhelmingly favored Trump and the GOP in the last election cycle - which is no surprise, as they're all extremely rich - at the same time they were publicly pledging to stand with their players against racism.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

I mean, as you say, there's a limit to what should reasonably expect from professional athletes, and I absolutely appreciate the concrete achievement of forcing owners to turn stadiums into polling places

in general when I talk about the grossness I'm talking about owners and leagues themselves, not the players, whose individual politics usually vary much more than owners' (the NBA is pretty uniform but there are plenty of Trump supporters in hockey, baseball - idk about the NFL - and a whole slew of very unfortunate MAGA/QAnon types in MMA - including, of course, Dana White himself)

 

[IdleRich]

In NFL and NHL the casual watcher has no idea if the players are black or white or whatever.... in fact that's just a further consequence of the general dehumanising of those participants... it's like a robot war.

 

[Leo]

pretty fair guess that hockey players are white!

 

[IdleRich]

I knew someone would say that.

 

[IdleRich]

But surely not all of them... funny, I was watching in Russia one time and they had interviews with the team and they were all tall and slim and I suddenly realised that I'd always assumed that they were massive wide fuckers cos of all the armour.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

But surely not all of them...

the NHL is like 98% white. I mean no surprise there.

I used to ride home past the United Center pretty often and you could tell if it was a Hawks or Bulls game letting out by the racial makeup of the crowd

 

[Corpsey.]

The forward blackness of the NBA is one of many reasons the NFL dominates. white people only make up about a third of NBA viewership- not that theres extensive polling on this, but the little done comes back with the same story.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

I will say this for hockey - those dudes are fucking tough. that is a brutal sport.

 

[IdleRich]

It's my favourite of the - what, four? - big American sports... it's basically the same structure as football of course so no surprises there.

 

[Leo]

and hockey fans can also be bruisers. few things worse than having to go through penn station when game is letting out at Madison sq garden above. drunk rangers fans, yeah!

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

The forward blackness of the NBA is one of many reasons the NFL dominates. white people only make up about a third of NBA viewership- not that theres extensive polling on this, but the little done comes back with the same story.

I think it was a big reason why the NBA decided to aggressively (and successfully) go global earlier than any other league

your market share in America is always going to have a built-in cap, start pursuing other markets

are you old enough to really remember Malice at the Palace or no?

it was like a nuclear bomb going off on the concept of broadly selling the NBA to white America

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

I will always blame the referees first and foremost for that debacle btw

literally the most important part of your job is to make sure the game doesn't get out of hand like that in the first place

 

[Corpsey.]

I think it was a big reason why the NBA decided to aggressively (and successfully) go global earlier than any other league

your market share in America is always going to have a built-in cap, start pursuing other markets

are you old enough to really remember Malice at the Palace or no?

no but I have very early memories of my parents calling players like Kobe and Iverson 'thugs' which is semi related

 

[Corpsey.]

They've recanted, had a proud son moment when my dad watched an Iverson documentary and saw he was just victim of the justice system and racist media portrayal (not that Iverson is a saint but he was undoubtedly fucked over). The NBA is great at generating player profiles and marketing their stars, probably also in part due to the difficulties it was always going to have in presenting to white America.

 

[Leo]

white America had a hard time with long baggy shorts and tats.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

no but I have very early memories of my parents calling players like Kobe and Iverson 'thugs' which is semi related

it's 100% related. the early 00s discourse around Iverson was bad at the time, in retrospect it's appalling.

it's not like there aren't legitimate reasons to criticize both of them for terrible personal behavior, but tattoos and dress and rap were yunno not those reasons. neither was that super fucked up railroading Iverson got in high school, which was some straight up Scottsboro Boys-lite shit.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

but I think you could really say that Iverson's titanic personal struggle with the league wrought the modern NBA. the league "won" because of course it did, you can't beat the house, but he forced the league to move toward him in acknowledging that players could be unapologetically loud and black without being called some euphemism for uppity - he never talked about politics (AI was not a woke dude) but all those outspoken players now are much more a product of AI than of MJ.

that was always the appeal of AI tho, on and off the court, one (regular-sized) man against the world, against all odds

a player that would never in a million years work in today's NBA - a 6 foot 160 lb guard who can't shoot? - and tbh didn't even really work in the early 00s NBA, but that was the point that he couldn't work and yet did through sheer force of will

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

his practice soliloquy is still the greatest press conference performance in the history of sports

and people remember it as like a proto-meme, which yes, but he's also directly refuting all those racially tinged Play the Right Way laziness accusations