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Like a snapshot of part of our American society, the sports world may provide us some interesting insight in to what direction our society in general is going. The National Basketball Association has authority over the team sport of professional basketball, which is played by five men on a team against each other over a specific period of time. Professional hockey and footbal have been to a degree, classical contact sports, with at least some form of physical violence involved while playing the game. Constrasted with these two have been basketball and baseball, where contact is not essential, for team victory and in some cases is specifically penalized; this is especially true in the NBA, though if you just started watching it this year for the very first time, you may not realize it.
Having followed the NBA rather closely for more than thirty years, I believe my observations may hold some amount of weight or validity.
In the 1960s, it was a FOUL, called by a supposedly impartial objective OFFICIAL, to have anything other than light incidental brushing contact with an opposing player and touching that player with your hands in any way, was a game foul, which accumulated in number until the fouling player became ineligable for further game play. Basketball showcased leaping ability especially, but other gymnastic or ballet like moves could be attributed to the greatest basketball ALLSTARS. Boy, have things changed since then!
Sometime between now and then basketball changed into looking more like James Caan's " Rollerball " than the graceful NBA moves of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell, Bob Cousey and Jerry West. The first hatchetman I have a conscious memory of was the Chicago Bulls guard Jerry Sloan, now a respected coach but back in the 1970s he was a very different story. Though not in professional ball, I have this fleeting memory of Coach John Wooden saying something in a 1960s college NCAA playoff game like, " I am going to put Sven Nader in and you know what he is going to do "; this may be a complete brain fart, but it was great fun to watch The Big Lou at UCLA, though a whole lot easier to see over Bill Walton in geography class!
As the 1970s wound down, a few additional players got a reputation for playing dirty; not hard, like they call it now. Somehow the fans have been conditioned to see dirty plays as playing agressively? Intentional fouls were committed by grabbing or holding and not raking or hitting like today. Flagrant fouls got you thrown out of the game, and about half of the fouls I see these days would have qualified as flagrant fouls in 1969.
Now, it so seems that playing dirty, committing both intentional and flagrant fouls, and even acting out non-fouls to confuse the officials, has become common place? In a league where the number of players kicked out of games started out small, it has become an almost normal process for the opposing team to commit intentional fouls in an aggressive physical manner with the intent to degrade the players temporary atheletic performance ( like hit 'em in the hand or on the arm very hard )?
I am telling you, the game they play now bears little resemblence to what they played even back in the 1980s. Magic Johnson could never have played all five positions and scored forty plus points in the finals against the Philadelphia 76ers, had the game been called in the ' let them beat each other up ' fashion it is played in currently.
I think the players started playing more dirty and physically after the sport gained enough noteriaty and media monetary support to pay the players at the multi-million dollar level? Needless to say, the violence has been rising over the decades, along with the salaries. Michael Jordan began a scowling bad boy carreer of slam dunk in your face attitude like nobody had ever seen before. Julius " Doctor J " Erving was as much of the high flyer act as Jordan was a decade earlier, but with less violence and bigger hair.
Enter the network coverage by NBC of the NBA, especially the playoffs, providing it's own encouragement to the gratuitous violence through close-ups and in depth interviews with the most vicious of the combatants. The coverage seemed to accentuate the pre-game, half time and post game shows starring the likes of Hannah Storm, ex-players, ex-coaches and assorted b-ball groupies, including celebrity Jack Nicholson wannabees!
It was truely weird, the whole thing was like a professional wrestling scripted something-or-other fest. The close-ups of the latest thug mugging it up for the camera, who was only fined ten thousand dollars for intentionally striking an opposing player after the final buzzer of the previous game, while a more unagressive stander-by from the other team was both fined and suspended for just getting up off the bench in a more previous game? Go figure, the other featured NBA player had been kicked out of the first game only a few days before and NBC showed shot after shot of him getting in the official's face in the best baffoonery and saliva projection to date. The problem is that it seems like they are rewarding the more violent action with more coverage and no suspensions? Curiously, the officials all seem to be wearing blinders when dealing with these ' bad boys ', but magnifying glasses with the less vicious, or clean, players.
Can they be scripting NBA games? How about scripting whole seasons; sick thought huh? I did think for a moment about how many millions of dollars of possible advertising revenue NBC loses if a best of seven game series only goes four games, or a five game series only three. The human animal has been found to be corruptable in the other non-contact sport of baseball, so why is it so far fetched to think that the rising cost of NBA player salaries and television rights didn't also spell the rising cost of bribery as well? And then there is the personal kind of corrupt intervention, when a particular official tends to intentionally call more fouls on a team he intrinsically hates ( why do the initials JO come to mind immediately? )!
Why don't we just give them pads and eliminate all the fouls?
- Bongo ( Jump Brawl? )
