Diss Guy: Matt Barnes’s Emotions Keep N-Word in the Headlines
It was Wednesday night and I was celebrating my birthday with my wife, a couple of beers and the Thunder-Clippers game when Matt Barnes and Serge Ibaka exchanged tough guy postures and clenched fists that drew ejections for both. On his way to the locker room, Barnes scooped up his son and carried him out as if to say, “We don’t need this crap.” He took to twitter shortly after and told us what was really on his mind in a strongly-worded tweet that was soon deleted:
With 27 characters still remaining, Matt Barnes kicked up a maelstrom of emotions from a variety of NBA commentators and former players. Coming just a short time after the controversial bullying and race-laden story involving Miami Dolphins’ offensive linemen Richie Incognito (who is white) and Jonathan Martin (who is black – both of his parents are mixed), Barnes’s tweet created an opportunity for NBA personalities to weigh in on the topic which they willingly did on TNT and NBA TV where Charles Barkley (TNT) and Isiah Thomas (NBA TV) presented opposing perspectives on the topic.
Barkley’s thesis could be summed up in his own words:
I’m a black man. I use the n-word. I’m going to continue to use the n-word with my black friends, with my white friends, they are my friends… In the locker room and when I’m with my friends, we use racial slurs. But this debate … what I do with my black friends is not up to white America to dictate to me what’s appropriate and inappropriate.
Barkley goes on to meander through the conversation making references to courage that seem out-of-context or poorly thought through, but the primary two points he makes are contextual (as words are used in locker rooms and with friends) and in relationship to “white America.” Barkley’s description of “white America” is somewhat vague as he makes references to white reporters and the “Paula Deen thing,” but “white America” elicits a passionate exasperation from Barkley who concurs with host Ernie Johnson (who is white) that Barnes shouldn’t have used the word publicly, but that it’s not up to “white America” to “dictate” the rules around how and when the word is used.
Isiah Thomas’s position was opposite Barkley’s. Instead of building a case around when it’s OK to say, Thomas takes the stance that it’s never OK. He invoked the word’s Webster’s definition along with civil rights advocates Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X in making what was a calm, but firm argument against its usage:
We as African Americans should not be fighting to use this word. Why do we want to demean ourselves… this is the one word in the English language that we cannot redefine the meaning or the intent of the word … and when we say, ‘Oh it’s an endearing term, oh I really like you’ … well, that carries weight and it’s going to affect you. The n-word affects us all … we as African Americans should not fight to call each other the n-word.
Thomas asks for the word to be “put in a box,” for the word to be “abolished” and makes his most poignant point when he mentions the n-word as the last word heard by black people as they hung from trees. He implores people to “get a little smarter and follow Martin Luther King, follow Malcolm X.” Thomas’s weakest points are his references: using Webster’s to define the n-word calls to mind Spike Lee’s biopic, Malcolm X where the Nation of Islam teaches Malcolm that the dictionary was written by white men – a reference of sorts to the institutionalization of racism.
In a country still so tangled up in the complexity of race relations; where Stop and Frisk laws are passionately defended, where black men can be killed just for seeking help, where Trayvon Martin dies and George Zimmerman is protected by controversial Stand Your Ground laws; the sensitive, highly personal sentiments shared by Barkley, Thomas, made by Michael Wilbon and Chuck D, create necessary contexts and advance understanding that helps prevent dumbass assumptions and create more awareness around cultural sensitivities.
Miss Guy: Tank Talk gone Wild: Coach K is appalled
Tanking is obviously un-American
I wish a lot of things. I wish I could retire early and toss all my earthly stresses in a bottomless trash can of forget. I wish the sun shone more in Seattle. I wish my dog could occasionally speak – even though I’m kind of terrified to hear what’s going on in that little walnut-sized brain. And I wish that every time the Sixers or Suns or Jazz played a game this season my twitter timeline wasn’t overflowing with terrible jokes about tanking. In case you haven’t noticed; it’s become the most prevalent topic of this young season and started sometime in the summer when teams started gutting their rosters, pressing reset buttons, shattering glass covered in red letters reading: “In Case of Emergency: Break.” GMs and coaches were rotated on conveyor belts and players were swapped like strategic assets with arms and legs and agents. Three teenagers yet to take their first college courses were coveted by all: Julius Randle at Kentucky, Jabari Parker at Duke, and Andrew Wiggins at Kansas. And everyone was so excited for these young men who could potentially redirect the trajectory of an entire franchise and thus an entire city, an entire fan base, a Lebron or Tim Duncan-esque savior radiating so many possibilities that bloggers and paid writers, analysts and soothsayers pooled their collective thoughts together and as a collective with a million different pitches and tones they screamed and pointed: “Tanking!”
Philadelphia gave up all-star point guard Jrue Holiday for an unproven kid named Nerlens who’s still recovering from an ACL he tore at Kentucky. Phoenix let Luis Scola go, then traded Marcin Gortat and said they did it because Miles Plumlee (acquired in exchange for Scola) was so impressive. The Jazz decided to put their eggs in the little baskets of the youthful Enes Kanter and Derrick Favors. Proven commodities like Al Jefferson and Paul Millsap were passed on for bright hopeful futures and … a shot at Randle, Parker, or Wiggins—or so we would all believe.
The narrative built up steam over the summer with Truehoop addressing the topic with vim and vigor. The consensus being that, in some form, these franchises were constructing their rosters to lose, and thus win big in the lottery in 2014. Vegas agreed and set the win-total over/under at 16.5 for Philly, 21.5 for Phoenix, and 27.5 for Utah – three of the four lowest projections in the league.
Now, a few weeks into the season, Philly’s 5-6, Phoenix is 5-4, and the Jazz are a miserable 1-10. And where tanking sits as a lazy go-to joke for bloggers and the twitter set, that bastion of amateur hoops, Mike Krzyzewski, head coach at Duke, multi-time NCAA champion, USA men’s basketball coach and multi-gold medal winner, that emblem of college hoops, decided to weigh in on the potential that pro teams are tanking:
As an American, I wouldn’t like to think that an American team would want to lose or create situations where you would want to lose. I can’t even fathom – I can’t go there. I can’t believe that would happen. Maybe I’m naïve and I’m going to go read a fairytale after this.
For context, this quote was delivered after scouts from every NBA franchise descended on the Champions’ Classic in Chicago like a pack of sophisticated heartless assessors weighing the talents of Randle, Parker, and Wiggins – in the same grand place at the same prime time with their skills laid out on the national stage like cadavers splayed across a steel pan made just for a human being to be examined with all their flaws and scientific vulnerabilities. There they (the scouts) sat and there we (the fans) sat and there he (Krzyzewski) sat, understandably protective of his newest star, the young Mr. Parker. But for Krzyzewski, a man with a ringside seat at the theater of the absurd that is college basketball recruiting, a man who watches kids as young as 13 or 14 play basketball and develop their skills while greedy, opportunistic men ingratiate themselves into the families of boys in ghettoes and suburbs across the country, who flirt with one another at AAU tournaments while representatives from global corporations like Nike and adidas gauge the potential signability of the latest meteorically-rising sophomore; for this man to question the desperate measures a pro team would go to in order to improve their chances at landing a future superstar is enough to make a man sniff glue.
Aside from Coach K’s comments being annoyingly hyperbolic (so NCAA), his words reveal part of the major issue around the tanking conversation: there are multiple strategies to manage the long-term vs. short-term needs of an NBA team – many of those long-term strategies employ tactics often referred to as tanking. Diss writer Kevin Draper expertly covered this issue a couple weeks ago. That Phoenix and Philadelphia are so significantly exceeding expectations reinforce the notion that there are different ways to rebuild which may or may not fall under the vague umbrella of tanking. The early returns from these teams challenge the narrative that was so earnestly crafted in the summer and reignited in Chicago when we saw how good these three freshmen are.
Coach K’s comments are rooted in an absolutist ignorance of teams intentionally losing games; of players and/or coaches not playing hard or preparing. Whether you choose to see his comments as “naïve” or just unintelligently uninformed, they further the pro/college debate and stink of the old “college kids do it for the love, pros just do it for the money” myth to which NCAA hoops purists so frequently fall back on.
The self-righteous stench of his comments (“shame on whoever is doing it”) and weak attempts to somehow make a connection to some American ethos reveal an old school, out-of-touch mentality that, unlike Barkley and Thomas above, does nothing to add to what is a very reasonable conversation around tanking. To borrow from Isiah’s comments on using the n-word above, can’t we all just get a little smarter about how we talk about tanking?