With the team starting to win not only games but the respect and admiration of their peers, the beauty of Hinkie’s plan continues to unfold from beyond his (basketball) grave. Suddenly, with Ben Simmons’s debut still to come, we can root for the Process and root for success at the same time.
In the winter of 1993, a young man moved to Prague with the idea of finding a pro or semi-pro basketball team and convincing them to let him join. It was a dumb idea, partly because the young man didn’t know if they even had pro or semi-pro basketball teams in Prague, partly because he didn’t speak any Czech and partly because he was, in the grand scheme of things, just okay at basketball.
Had I really moved on from my shame? It seemed that time had merely softened the bumps of my past, not erased them. I returned to campus for the 2016 alumni game determined to understand.
Black Gods of the Asphalt depicts the passionate joys of street basketball in tournaments that commemorate the dead; where play may be both ecstatic and an act of mourning.
It’s the hypotheticals of that moment that haunt me. What if he’d tripped over his legs and blown out his knee, or gone tumbling into the wall and hit his head in a way that triggered bleeding in his brain? At the time, I thought of myself as an activist. Some of my teammates even came to my support—I’d stood up to the coaches. But the self-aggrandizement quickly dissolved into guilt, and six years later it’s more or less remained with me.
The NBA’s Summer League concludes next Monday with the mini-tournament’s championship game, held at the Thomas & Mack Center in Las Vegas, Nevada. So last weekend, as the Summer League was about to kick off, I did what I like to do and embarked on another road trip into the desert to watch some more meaningless exhibition games.
Maybe, after Sunday, it’s time we realize that J.R., knowingly or not, may have heard us all along. Every word, the forgiving and the flaying, building towards some hellish clamor he couldn’t ignore anymore.
Minnesota is in the midst of a run that may come to rival any professional team, mens or womens, of this era. Perhaps, with their season-opening winning streak now reaching 13 games and counting, the country will pay even more attention and take that much sought after final step into “crossover story.”
There are no ifs, maybes or caveats allowed in American sports and now in American culture—you’re either a champion or you’re a loser: a nothing. Because, as anyone who’s played a team sport has heard countless times from some numbskull coach, “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”
Regardless of what happens in these Finals, the outcome will be memorable. But for any real, dedicated basketball fan? There’s no choice but to root for the Golden State Warriors.