I Despise Skip Bayless

I think about sports too much. This is not the first time I’ve concluded this, for my entire life has been molded around the world of sports.  I suppose it will come as no surprise, then, when I tell you that I am a sportswriter. I grew up in Colorado, where people used to believe that there are two seasons: the Broncos and the offseason. Of course, things are different nowadays, with the new hockey team, the basketball team’s resurgence, and various other teams vying for the public’s attention. People still follow the Broncos, but rarely with the passion of the old days, when the city’s heart swelled with pride after each victory and each loss cast a pall over Colorado that was not lifted until the next big win. It had been my dream to write sports for as long as I can remember, ever since I started reading the daily paper with my father while we sat together eating breakfast on weekend mornings.

My father was the first person to teach me about football, but definitely not the last. He explained the game to me when I was only 8, and patiently answered my questions about it, until I asked him for the umpteenth time which was offense and which was defense. He turned to me, finally exasperated, and told me to figure out. I waited for the announcer to tell me, and they quickly became my new tutors. I was immediately hooked on football, the long passes, the vicious hits, the crowd erupting after each big play. Until I discovered basketball.

Basketball then was a perfect game, the ultimate team game. Five players on the court worked in harmony for one singular goal, to score a bucket. Watching Wooden’s teams setting screens, using picks, moving the ball, rebounding, playing tough defense, it was poetry. It only got better as I moved my attention to the pro game. It was as though all the shortcomings of college teams, the lack of height and speed and skill, had been stripped away, and the result was a like a well-oiled machine, flawless, humming smoothly along with no end in sight. Pistol Pete. The Big O. Willis Reed, Kareem, Magic, Wilt, Bill Russell, Bob Cousy, George “Iceman” Gervin, DT, Dr. J. They were the men that ruled my world, and showed me how to execute a perfect offensive set.

I remember running outside during the summer to practice shooting like Larry Bird, handling like Jerry West, and passing like Pete Maravich, from sun-up until my mother called me in, usually when it was so dark I couldn’t discern between the ball and the darkness of the night, just reaching my hands straight out until they met the ball as it bounded through the net. During the winter, I would rush outside after school to shoot and practice dribbling. When it snowed, ours would be the first clean driveway and I would practice until my pants were black and my fingers were red and raw. I practiced and practiced and imagined turning pro, imagined the day I heard my name at the draft and coach looking me in the eye during a crucial playoff game and saying `Be ready, we’re going to you,’ and I would nod solemnly, knowing that this was why I had practiced so much as a kid, why I had idolized players during my youth, that this was my moment, to become them, to teach a new generation of kids how to perform, how to be a professional, how to be a basketball player.

Only it never happened. During my sophomore year in high school, I sprouted six inches to five foot eight, and while that made me the tallest member of my family, it also made me the shortest member of the JV team. Our perennial title contending varsity team apparently had no need for a five foot eight point guard who was slow and inconsistent at best, for even with all my practicing, the game moved too fast for my slow catch and release jumper.

So I moved on. I began writing, and after graduating college secured a job as a beat writer for a team on the East Coast, and eventually got my own space on page one of the sports section. It was in an office for that paper on the Eastern seaboard where I sat the day after professional basketball has taken the biggest hit to its reputation in its history, stunned in disbelief over what I saw, a small skirmish turning into a full-fledged riot, replete with player v. fan, fan v. player, even the seemingly requisite chair throwing. What was most shocking in the aftermath was the attitude of the players, which ranged from utter disdain to condemnation to minor acceptance to understanding. I sat in silence, my hand covering my mouth, thinking, `I don’t understand this game anymore.’ I turned to my computer, and, with no hesitation, began typing furiously, the words flowing so quickly from my mind that my fingers had trouble keeping pace.

The words quickly became an attempt to explain everything that was wrong with the game, how the beauty and innocence of the game of my youth had been ignored and ripped away and carelessly tossed aside, left for dead by the current generation, who instead exploited their position as role models, as public ambassadors, as professional athletes. They became their own enterprises, their own corporations, oblivious to common decency and social conduct, living in an insulated world of wealth and privilege, a world that they had never known growing up and had no idea how to function in as adults. And while they awoke day after day, the knowledge that they were set for life in the forefront of their minds, we sat and watched and cheered and waited – waited for one moment of lucidity from these athletes, when they realized that we were the ones they owed. Their paycheck, their respect, their lives, they owed it all to us, the fans, the sportswriters, the media, the ones who made them, and who could end their careers in an instant. Waited for a moment when they realized what the ballplayers before them already knew, that without all of us, there would be none of them.

Writing an article had become a part of my daily routine, like shaving and showering, and equaled such acts in its simplicity. This article was not difficult by any means, but the feeling I had was something that I hadn’t felt in years, a feeling of simultaneous exuberance and defiance, as though what I had just written was something that should have been said years ago, to stop the insanity that emanates from professional athletes like the foul stench of a rotting carcass.

As I left the office and headed towards the studio, I wondered if I had been too vicious. Since the start of my show, both radio and television, I occasionally spouted inane opinions in order to `stir the pot,’ as I often said. If the calls bored me, or I felt exceptionally salty, I would say something that often I didn’t believe, almost condescendingly urging the audience, consciously provoking a reaction. Occasionally, it got me in real trouble, but I made sure I said just enough to get reprimanded or suspended, nothing that would jeopardize my career. I knew, however, that I had a lot of rope to work with before I hung myself, for the advent of 24 hour cable sports channels had just recently taken a page from CNN and FOXNews, offering `analysis’ shows where opinionated, personable writers such as myself were in high demand and short supply. I also realized as I prepared for the show that this was not a time for carefree opinions, and I felt completely comfortable vilifying the players, backing my article in person, on national television, because that would make me an honorable, trustworthy person, the kind of man my father was, the kind of man he wanted to be, and the kind of man I wanted to be, not for him, but to show myself as a man that others could respect.

The next night I sat in my press box seat, watching a team of uber-talented underachievers collect their paychecks against a team with half their talent. This was my team, I thought as I headed down to the locker room after the game had mercifully ended. It had gone from a perennial title contender to a team in a constant `rebuilding phase,’ a fashionable sports term for `consistently horrible,’ playing in front of a half-full arena night after night, making promises about potential and preaching patience, all the while raking in huge profits while we waited for a next year that never came. I sighed quietly to myself as I opened the double doors into the spacious locker room, but all my thoughts were drowned out by the thumping bass beats of the locker room stereo, which filled the space around my body so fully that I nearly had to push them away, like walking through a thick jungle. The room itself was absolutely enormous, a huge circular behemoth, banked by oak paneled lockers around the walls. Each locker came complete with a small flat screen television, stereo, Playstation, DVD player. Some of the more privileged players had traded in their folding chairs for full-on recliners, and the younger players sat hypnotized in front of their televisions, some having yet to shower. I longed for the days when a professional locker room was no different than a high school’s, a tiny room where anyone who entered could ascertain the outcome of the game on the vibe that flowed through, and shared with the team both in the electricity of victory and the coldness and solitude of loss.

Each player’s demeanor changed radically when myself or the cameras from the late night news stopped by, and I watched in astonishment as their faces took on a dour expression over the outcome of the contest, belying the happiness that their faces bore only moments before, disgust and sadness that rang hollow to those of us in the room. Their lack of regard for their profession only strengthened my argument in my column, which many had read and did not win me any fans, at least not in this locker room. I moved to Jones’ locker, where he sat quietly, surveying the scene. He was, at one time, one of the kids that I had vilified in my column, the first in twenty years to go pro straight out of high school. We drafted him first in the draft, and I had written several articles openly criticizing the franchise for putting their hopes on the shoulders of an 18 year old. Like many others, he had scrapes with the law in high school, one serious enough that he was forced to move to a different state, but his talent and potential made him a solid number one. What I didn’t know at the time, and what I couldn’t have predicted, was his passion to win, his drive to excel, and how his upbringing would positively affect his life, in spite of his mistake. He was now in his late twenties, and a veteran of the league. He was one of the few that I respected, and I felt that he respected me, but tonight his expression turned dark and he hunched over as soon as I wandered over.

I don’t remember the particulars of the conversation, or how it got so heated so quickly. My objective for talking to him was to interview him about the game, for another article about the state of the franchise. As it turned out, he had read my article and was less than pleased with the stance I took, and while he didn’t come out and defend the players involved in the brawl, he didn’t condemn their actions, an extremely hypocritical view that I pointed out to him. I thought about what he said later that night at my house after everyone had gone to sleep, sitting in my living room, watching highlights with no sound in the dark while sipping a whiskey. Jones claimed that the real hypocrisy was mine, loving the game while hating the players. He said that when I grew up, I had identified with Cousy and Russell, Magic and Kareem, Dr. J and MJ because they acted how I thought black athletes should act, or they were white. They kept their heads down, they stayed in line, they spoke quietly and respected the media that would tear them down at the first sign of wrongdoing. He cited the numerous stories about Dr. J’s illegitimate child, Magic’s womanizing, Jordan’s gambling, Kareem’s cold and occasionally elitist attitude as examples of the media’s attempts to bring down athletes, even those who we considered sacred. The difference, he said, was that nowadays black athletes acted like they wanted to. Iverson has tattoos, Barkley was loud, Marbury is cocky, and they don’t hide, because it is who they are. They have no need for writers, and don’t really care what we think, having learned from their predecessors that we will bury them if it gets us the front page, under the guise of `doing our job.’ My reluctance to accept that, he said, was the subtle bigotry of the current sports media, where they can disparage individual athletes for living their lives and in the same breath hail the game as heroic, beauty personified, as a game of flight that often defies description. I defended my position, and still believe that I am right, that the game was better then, when the athletes were humble, writers were friends, and the goal was a championship, not a shoe deal. I told him that the selfishness and less than enthusiastic play had ruined the league, and all I did was report what I saw, that I was objective, I was a journalist, it was my job. He looked wide-eyed at me and turned his back, laughing softly and shaking his head. And now I sit in my chair, sipping my drink, and still believe with all of my heart that I am right.

I can’t pinpoint it, the day, the hour, even if it was a season when it happened, when the game stopped being about execution and teamwork and became about dunks and threes and throat-slashes and shoes and hip-hop and tattoos and endorsements and kids going pro. I can’t remember the exact moment teams stopped establishing the inside game and then went outside, and just started “breaking defenders down,” or even if there was an exact moment. I would bet that there wasn’t one moment, because in general things like this is sports don’t change in an instant; it takes a generation for something to happen, and it happens in such a slow-moving fashion that one day you’re watching the ball being swung from side to side by players you recognize, identify with, even think you know, and the next moment you’re sitting in $50 seat with your 10 year old in the second level wondering why you’re cheering for boy – an 18 year old boy for chrissakes – with tattoos covering his arms and neck who just minutes before the game was whining about how he can’t possibly be happy with his paycheck when his stats are 10 times those of (insert name here) from (insert team), and therefore, after extensive thought by himself, his agent, his mother, his financial advisor, and his boys, feels he deserves at least a 50% pay raise. And I sit back and think to myself, I don’t want to be here. I don’t want my son to see this, I don’t want these seats, I don’t want these players, I don’t want this coach, I don’t want this team. And just as I’m thinking this, the same kid, with the tattoos and the attitude and the agent and the advisor and the entourage, deflects a pass, grabs the ball and races upcourt, never slowing as he takes two steps inside the three point line, rises and throws down a thunderous dunk that brings the house down. On the replays they show on the screen, it looks like his head was clean above the rim and his hand, with the ball, was above the backboard, and I look to my left and see my boy, his arms raised, screaming with joy. And I love this game, once again. And for a moment, I even love the players.