I’m watching the Warriors game, and it’s a tense 4th quarter in which they’re completely blowing the game after building up a nice lead. So the situation is serious, the game is almost over and it looks like the Hornets are about to tie or win the game. The players set up, Warriors possession, and Mike Dunleavy Jr. goes to inbound the ball. The station cutting together shots of players, looking intense, from different angles, building the drama. And then the announcer says, kind of amazed, “Thunder just knocked over Dunleavy. The MASCOT just knocked over Dunleavy.”
And they quickly cut to a wide angle of the players, and you see Thunder strutting away, playing to the crowd, and Mike wobbling a little bit and looking around like, “What the fuck? Did that really just happen?”
I wish the camera had been on that scene when it happened, rather than just catching the tail end of it. I thought that really exemplified the conflicts of nature within professional sports. On one hand, the athletes take it so incredibly seriously. There’s a lot of ego involved. These tense moments on the court that mean the difference between winning and losing may as well mean the difference beween life and death. They’re here to do a job; a delicate job–squeaking out a win–that requires almost godly focus and discipline.
And then there are the fans who came not so much to watch exceptionally skilled athletes as to have the all-inclusive wild night out, who merge into a rowdy crowd and demand to be entertained, who dance like morons to be on the Jumbotron, whose life missions at that very moment is to catch a rolled up t-shirts shot from a cannon…as watch the Mascot run around being goofy like a hyperactive village idiot. No offense to village idiots everywhere.
How can the players work under this condition?
Yeah, they get paid millions to do it. Deal with this circus around what they have dedicated their lives to. But it really takes away from the gravity of their abilities, doesn’t it? Like, I think thundersticks should be banned at basketball games. I know the teams will hand them out for free to people sitting behind the visitor’s basket. It was some marketing genius’ idea of making the fans feel more involved in the outcome of the games. If they make enough noise, they affect the other teams ability to score and thus, contributing to a win or loss. And yes, one could argue that a good player should be so focused, that even the distraction and noise of thundersticks won’t distract him. But honestly, I’m not a purest, but if I were a basketball player and had to deal with that noise and distraction every time I was trying to gather myself into a tiny pinpoint of focus, repetitively every few days for months on end, my nerves would be shot. I would have a very short fuse. It’d be really easy for me to snap, in just a heated enough moment.
I mean, you remember Ace Ventura, right? “Laces out” ? Dude, I’m telling you. This is a very, very serious matter.
NBA not banning thundersticks during games= Athletes snapping = Sean Young strapping her penis between her legs.
Check my math. I think you’ll find that I’m not wrong.