Who is this guy? He proceeds to write another article justifying the first one, and this is his lead. Are you kidding me?
Later in the article he pulls out the inevitable justifications, the ol’ “Hey, we’re ALL racist” line. Which of course he brought to our attention with his first article.
This guy is unbelievable. He does everything but admit that his first article was a shit-stirrer, a nationwide troll. And this guy is a writer? Give me a break. If this guy were on the SDMB he’d be well on his way to a total meltdown.
If the success (though ultimate failure) of Jayson Blair is any indication, sometimes it ain’t what facts you include in your writing but how many people read it that determines if you get published. A certain amount of that, for some people and some venues, is shock value in writing. “Yeah, I just said that absolute bullshit. Keep reading, I’ll spew some more!”
Bullshit? Yeah. Worth your time? Fuck no. Going to keep getting facetime until someone comes along who gets even more views? Abso-fucking-lutely. Shock sells where writing of actual integrity sometimes cannot.
[QUOTE=tomndebb(OTOH, any idiot who claims to be a writer but cannot spell supersede correctly is not going to keep my readership.)[/QUOTE]
Ahh, I hate to nitpick someone who has helped me out in GQ so recently, but both spellings are acceptable. One may be more so, according to preference, but neither is wrong.
Interesting this. I note that Merriam-Webster online lists supercede as a ‘variant’ of supersede. I wonder if this represents the resurrection of an old word, or the creation of a new word essentially because so many people spell it that way anyway (after all, super and cede are two Latin words that work okay together).
The supercede variant has only been admitted to dictionaries in the last five years, or so. I will accept this Descriptivist usage from business managers and others who generally only use English as a second language (behind whatever jargon they use as a primary mode of communication). A writer, however, should be held to a higher standard. I suppose that one could cut some slack for sportswriters, dismissing them as jargonauts, but I have known some wonderful sportswriters and prefer to accord them the respect of holding them to the more rigorous code.
If you actually read the first Whitlock column (link), starting with the paragraph beginning “It’s just more denial” and ending with “almost year round,” he makes a number of actually cogent observations about the differences between the NBA style of play and international play, the fallacy of assuming that pro athletes who play for most of the year would be all that interested in the Olympics, and the near-impossible task of putting together a working team in a short time frame. And the truth is that the NBA has been waning in popularity for some time. It’s fallacious to suggest there’s something racist about that, especially given the praise heaped upon Larry Brown’s team of no-name but mostly dark-skinned Pistons for beating those stupid, selfish, bickering millionaires from Los Angeles. But it’s hard to dispute that the post-MJ generation of players has not drawn the popularity of the earlier generation. Chalk it up in part to the players themselves - Bird, Magic, and MJ were great players on the court and graceful gentlemen off of it. Chalk up part of it also to a more intrusive press - Magic and MJ both kind of had some dirty laundry aired about their private behavior, but that was towards the end of their careers. The press now looks at these players’ private behaviors more closely, from their ostentatious public displays of wealth to a fascination some of them have with guns and gangs. And then there is Kobe. Who probably had the best shot to become the next MJ, the next public face of basketball. And who blew that chance. Whether you believe what he said or what she said, it’s still not good for the league’s goodwill ambassador to admit to having sex with a woman other than his wife.
Then there is the globalization of the game. Honestly, baseball has had this issue for a while now. If you took all the players born outside the United States off of the MLB rosters and fielded an “American” team with the best of whoever was left, you’d be depriving the American team of a lot of talented players. When the first “Dream Team” in basketball was launched in 1992, they probably weren’t the best team players, but they were so much more skilled than the competition, they blew them away easily. The competition has gotten better.
I personally started losing interest in the NBA when the age of entry began dropping and high schoolers started playing. There was always something creepily exploitative about the way talent scouts, with either the tacit blessing or a blind eye from the NBA, filled the heads of talented teenagers and those around them with hoop dreams. Now that college is starting to become regarded as a waste of time for a true talent, you end up with a league where the average level of maturity is dropping.
The NBA has a lot of work to do to get its own house back in order. And even if they do, they probably still won’t be able to take down the world as easily.
From the original article: Sports writers across the country were fighting each other over the opportunity to go on TV or radio for the privilege of calling me an idiot, and to assure the masses that their hatred of Iverson, LeBron, Duncan, Melo and Boozer is appropriate…
Did anybody ahem “hate on” Duncan? Everybody I spoke with/heard/read felt bad that he was doing almost all the heavy lifting and was bunched in with the (no fundimentals) rest of the team. I have yet to hear a bad word about Timmy D.
It makes about as much sense, and at least you’d see a set of guys who play regularly as a team. One of the problems right now, though, is that the Olympics tacks on a fair number of games onto an already-long season. If I were the coach of the champs, I wouldn’t want to do it. And the NBA is unlikely to shorten the season to allow a few of its athletes to play international ball. The owners would be pissed if that happened, because it means fewer tickets sold during the regular season.
So, it’s a nice idea, but I’m not sure it’s going to work.
Well, that would be nice, except that it doesn’t really fix the problem of transitioning to international basketball rules (which probably was an even bigger hurdle for the Athens team), and plus just about any team would be out 2 or 3 players who would be internationals, so they’d have to be replaced with outsiders anyway.
Ohh, wrt Mr. Whitlock, I think Bill Simmons put it best in his Page 2 column this week
Does anyone remember the controversy over the olympic hockey team a few years ago. I thought they were a bunch of overpaid jerks who underperformed, but since they were white, I guess it wasn’t racist.
Sounds great, except… suppose the Spurs are the NBA champs. Tony Parker is French and Manu Ginobili is Argentinian. They wouldn’t be eligible! And these days, MOST good NBA teams would be in the same boat.
It’s a silly idea. First off, you’d have the problem that some teams would be gutted of their best players. For instance, Dallas would lose Dirk, Nash(of course, they’ve already lost him, but suppose they won last year) and Najera. Houston would be screwed out of Yao, Sacramento would be out Peja and Vlade (again, going with last year’s team), the Spurs would be really screwed - even more so if in the next Olympics Duncan goes with the Virgin Island team.
Second, you have no guarantee that they’d even WANT to go. Shaq and Kobe had no desire to play after their championship runs. Richard Hamilton and a few others off of the 2003 Detroit squad were invited but declined.
Third, it doesn’t necessarily solve the problem. I’m not so sure that under international rules, the championship Lakers squads of the past few years would do all that well. Just because this year’s NBA champion team happened to have the potential to be absolutely devastating in the Olympics doesn’t mean that will always be the case.
I think the best course would probably be to have the NCAA champions go. Expectations would be lower, the kids would probably all want to go and they’d have that team element that everyone wants us to have.
Either that, or just put use some common sense in putting the Olympic squad together. Stick a few Michael Redds and Brent Barrys on the squad.