Confessions of a Fair-Weather Knicks Fan
Jonathan Lethem blogs the NBA finals
Confessions of a Fair-Weather Knicks Fan
Jonathan Lethem
The problem with sports is that sports either: 1) functions as an allegorical enclosure inside which everything else (world, self) can be glimpsed and potentially even briefly made to reveal itself, or 2) is delightful precisely because it excludes everything else and offers a brief zone of perfect respite from the crushing truths of our petty sufferations.
The problem with writing about sports, then, is that you either: 1) embrace the first premise and guarantee sounding like some kind of idiot of projection, idealization, and Pathetic Fallacy, or 2) fall silent, as one might while beholding an eclipse or the Rothko Chapel or a livestream of a mother owl caring for its owlets. That’s to say, if sports is one of those transcendent things meant to humble and unite us in breathless regard for what can happen entirely outside ourselves, why deface it with the graffiti of individual response? (The great exception proving this rule is Annie Dillard’s essay about seeing an eclipse, “Total Eclipse.”) For this reason, I think, I’ve (mostly) sworn never to write about sports.
But wait, I’m already committing romantic nonsense to the page. The difference between a championship run and a total eclipse or the Rothko Chapel is that the eclipse and the Chapel aren’t accompanied by twenty-nine embarrassingly failed eclipses or Chapels. (There are thirty teams in the NBA, and for one of them to win the rest all have, eventually, to lose.) Nor are they accompanied by years, even decades, of failed eclipses or Chapels, all of them shrouded in excuses, recriminations, and equivocating statements like “We gave it our best” or “Nobody expected us even to get this far.” Sports is a vast sinkhole of failure, of abjection, of human error and inconstancy, all of which is only survived by those who produce it and those who devote themselves to it through gigantic engines of denial.
What’s more, it isn’t really possible to protect sports from an “outside” world of money, corruption, commercialization, gambling, politics, and celebrity worship; the beauties of sports are hedged at all sides by the sporting world’s propensity to generate these things from within its boundary. The moments we cherish are like splendid flowers sprouting atop a mountain of shit. It’s best not to place one’s nose right up against the flowers. Sometimes they are flecked with the shit, or reek from their symbiotic relationship with the mountain. Your childhood hero may not have been Pete Rose, or Wayne Gretzky, or Tiger Woods. You may have gotten luckier than that. Still, best not press in too closely.
Anyway, sports is constituted not of silence, but of language—of chatter, trash talk, statistics, listicles, broadcasts, post- and pre-game pressers, pleading calls to bookies, fickle avowals and disavowals of loyalty, bogus authoritativeness, fansplaining. The talk vastly outweighs the playing. So why not add a little more? I’ve agreed to blog the NBA Finals—destination, this year, of the possibly transcendent New York Knicks, who’ll face the San Antonio Spurs. A rare destination for the Knicks; they’ve not gone since 1999, and not since 1973 have they gone and won. It is this which has united the city in distraction, adoration, anticipation, and—of course—the unspeakable dread of having to tuck in at the meal of disappointment that is a true sports fan’s regular banquet.
Read the first installment of Lethem’s blog on the Review’s website here.
