Basketball/NBA Finals:At the climax of a long season, Bruce Selcraig wonders why all the attention is focused on style over substance
With the world's greatest hoop talent now on display in America's best-of-seven NBA Finals, with over two billion people watching on TV in 205 countries and 46 languages, I think it's time we ask the question: Why won't America's basketball-loving, hip-hop generation wear the jersey of one of the NBA's greatest living African-American superstars?
If a young player comes into my gym - I run a basketball programme in Austin, Texas, called HoopNation - wearing his purple-and-yellow Kobe Bryant top, I can safely assume this scholar-athlete is not bothered by the Los Angeles Lakers star's near-escape from a rape conviction, his him-or-me ultimatum that his former team-mate Shaquille O'Neal be traded or his fantastic but selfish obsession with scoring, which often leaves his gifted team-mates standing around as though waiting for a bus.
None of that matters because Kobe, who makes about €13 million a year, dunks fiercely. Kobe soars and scores. And Kobe swaggers. But if ego were intelligence he'd be Stephen Hawking.
Need a ripe metaphor for America today? Bryant's lost Lakers were easily eliminated weeks ago in the first round of the NBA playoffs, last week the petulant superstar demanded to be traded - then tearfully recanted - and yet his Laker jersey, that symbol of fan idolatry, outsells any other player's in the country.
"Kobe's my man," I often hear in the gym. "He's for real."
"It's about entertainment," my 17-year-old son reminds his fossilised coach.
Conversely, let me introduce you to Tim Duncan.
Unless you're an NBAficionado you might not know that Duncan is the 7ft, 18st 8lb (118kg) power forward of the San Antonio Spurs who, in a week or so, at the age of 31, will likely win his fourth NBA championship. (The Spurs are facing the overmatched Cleveland Cavaliers in the finals and easily won the first game, which we'll get to presently.)
For nine straight gruelling 82-game seasons (of which he played 746), Duncan has averaged a jaw-dropping 24 points, 13 rebounds, 3.5 assists and 2.4 blocks and been named to the NBA's All-Star and All-Defence teams more often than the tide comes in.
Intelligent, humble, loved by coaches and team-mates, this embodiment of consistency and selfless sacrifice is an absolute lock for the NBA Hall of Fame and is arguably the greatest power forward in history.
"Anyone who likes basketball," NBA Commissioner David Stern told me lately, "has to like Tim Duncan."
That must explain why America's style-over-substance youth won't be caught dead wearing Duncan's jersey, which ranks at the bottom (15th) on the NBA's best-seller list.
"He's boring," one of my 13-year-old players told me last week, speaking for millions like him. "He doesn't do anything."
Well, except win and make all those around him better.
White, black, Hispanic, Asian - it's hard to find an American teenager (outside San Antonio) who proudly wears the Duncan black-and-silver.
No wonder. He's not covered in tattoos and gold, has a psychology degree instead of a rap label, has never shamed his family or team with an arrest, and has a healthy disdain for most of the barking airheads who cover him on TV.
What a loser!
At my son's majority-black high school, 70 miles from San Antonio, to wear a Duncan top in the NBA-worshipping hallways is to invite ridicule or worse. It'd be like wearing a T-shirt saying: I like my parents. I do my homework. Beat me up.
More trees must perish to dissect this issue honestly, but clearly race and the perception of racial authenticity (if we must, "street-cred") shape this sad little hip-hop phenomenon.
Both Duncan and Bryant are African-Americans. Both are worldly, literate, funny (Duncan more privately) and very attuned to the subtleties of racial identity in America. Neither was raised in the stereotypical poverty that has produced so many NBA athletes. Duncan is from the US Virgin Islands, son of a midwife and a mason, while Bryant is the son of an NBA/European player and speaks fluent Italian. Both know how to choose a fine wine.
But here's all you need to know: Duncan plays a deeply fundamental game of basketball, almost completely devoid of me-first attitude and flash, so he is scorned by America's crotch-tuggin' homeboys.
"He plays white," one of my black players says, cutting through the niceties.
True, if that means Duncan rarely throws down the ferocious dunks that now define NBA stars. More often he's bedevilling opponents with a repertoire of "old school" bank shots, pump fakes designed to draw fouls, and frequent close-range tip-ins where he never brings the ball lower than his head, which coaches have been preaching since the Jurassic period.
When he blocks a shot, rather than make a "statement" by swatting it 30 rows into the stands (and giving it right back to the offence), Duncan tries to tip the ball to himself or a team-mate.
How boring.
He plays relentlessly, averaging 38 minutes a game over his career, but he plays so efficiently and without wasted motion or emotion that the untrained eye might think he's trying not to break sweat. Three times he's been named MVP of the Finals. Hold my eyelids open.
If that's playing white, I fear a lot of folks will be signing up for the Michael Jackson operation.
But don't shed a tear for Timmy. He may be the only NBA star who doesn't know exactly where his jersey ranks in the pantheon of hipness.
"Duncan is the most unchangeable superstar I've ever been around," says Sports Illustrated writer Jack McCallum, who has covered the NBA since shorts were short. "The publicity means absolutely, positively nothing to him."
That's very cool, but it's tragic that America's hip-hop culture can't quite embrace a wondrous, unique athlete who's risen to the top of his profession and is proudly unafraid to be himself.
Yet, this weekend it may be hard to even find Duncan beneath the deluge of cameras and microphones chasing the Cleveland Cavaliers manchild LeBron James.
Now in his third NBA season after coming to the league straight out of high school, the 22-year-old James is riding the crest of one of the greatest performances in NBA playoff history.
Last week, as the Cavaliers defeated the Detroit Pistons in Game Five of their series to reach the finals, the frighteningly talented King James scored 29 of his team's final 30 points, including 25 straight, to win in double overtime. Mortals don't do this.
At 6ft 8in and 17st 2lb (109kg), and usually the fastest, highest-leaping man on the floor, James offers glimpses of talent that remind us of Michael Jordan. He's not there in overall skill; Jordan was a far better shooter and defensive player, and excelled at literally every phase of the game.
James is still learning how dominating he can be, but now when he's on the tube, as in Jordan's best years, you feel compelled to watch. You might see something you'll need to describe to your grandchildren.
I just hope it's not a decapitation. LeBron jumps so high he literally has to duck his head when flying into the 10-foot-high rim. But, alas, LeBron - whose jersey already ranks number three on the NBA's most-hip list - has taken the overachieving Cavaliers as far as they will go.
The beautiful Spurs, led by Duncan, Frenchman Tony Parker, Argentinian Manu Ginobili and the league's best perimeter defender, the LeBron antidote, Bruce Bowen, are simply too balanced, too unselfish, too driven to lose.
In Thursday's first game, won by the Spurs 85-76, the Spurs suffocated James, holding him to only eight points through three quarters, 14 for the game. (In eight previous games against the Spurs, LeBron had averaged 24 points.)
The fingernail-chewing youngster never lost his poise, while shooting a miserable four-for-16 with six turnovers, but he happily gave up the ball all night long as Spur after Spur left his man to double-team him.
Masters of "helping" defence, the Spurs are all taught that whenever one great player begins to dominate them they collectively have to sacrifice.
Sounds easy and logical, the very staple of good football in your world, but again, in today's American sports culture, a lot of world-class players have an attitude that if they leave the man they're guarding in order to help a team-mate guard a better player it might leave someone else open for easy, perhaps embarrassing, baskets.
It's an issue of team trust. The Spurs have it. Many teams don't.
One hates to suggest a foregone conclusion, but barring a team-wide bout of food poisoning the Spurs should dispatch the Cavs in five games.
The Cavs, who have never been to the Finals before and were once synonymous with comical mismanagement, simply have no answer for Tony Parker, who scored 27 points on Thursday morning on an array of slicing layups down the middle and basic jump shots, or Mr Dull, Tim Duncan, who had 24 points, 13 rebounds and five blocked shots.
Though the Spurs should have won by 20 or 25 - they've often been accused of not having a killer instinct with lesser teams - at times they scored so easily by spreading wide and simply passing the ball until defensive weaknesses were exposed that the frustrated Cavs were left grasping, looking to their coach and the referees for help that never came.
Game two is tomorrow night.
And you thought the GAA championship season was long . . .
The National Basketball Association's interminable 82-game season (over 100 if you count pre-season exhibition games and post-season playoffs) culminates each year in four rounds of play-offs in the Eastern and Western conferences.
Players and coaches of the league's 30 teams all agree the season is way too long, increasing injuries and shortening playing careers, but it's all about money.
The play-offs start in April among the league's best 16 teams, with four best-of-seven series in each conference. Then the winners keep meeting in best-of-seven series until they reach the NBA Finals as champions of their respective conferences.
(That's right, the ultimate winner and loser in the finals could end up playing 28 post-season games if they played all seven games of their four playoffs.)
The all-important home-court advantage - one team always gets to play four of seven at home, if needed - is determined by which team had the best record during the regular season.
It's not exactly the Bataan Death March, but close.
