The most important thing to know about former Orlando Magic head coach Stan Van Gundy—more than his more-remarked-upon-than-actual, but also kind-of-actual resemblance to bepenised yam/veteran porn personage Ron Jeremy, more than his (generally quite successful) record as an NBA coach—is that he’s unbalanced. Not chemically, but with his time. This is a man who quite possibly does not know the identity of the current President of the United States and doesn’t feel badly about it, who hasn’t seen a movie in a theater since Regarding Henry, and who almost certainly slips up on a regular basis and says things like, “transition defense, you guys!” to his wife during sex. In other words, Stan Van Gundy is a fairly prototypical NBA coach, which means that the most important thing to know about labeling him “unbalanced” is that it’s a compliment, given his profession.
There was a time when NBA coaches were a more diverse group than the present fraternity. Don Nelson, who, over several decades, made a bunch of teams much more fun and somewhat more likely to win games, was basically @DadBoner—at least insofar as he did a lot of media interviews while drinking Bud tallboys and wearing Big Johnson t-shirts—but actually funny. Lenny Wilkens and Chuck Daly won a ton of games and projected some faintly American Dream vibes, in that both were blue-collar dudes who became really good at a difficult job, and were therefore able to both recognize and afford really sharp suits.
Some media outlets enlist entire staffs of college basketball experts and “bracketologists” to pick NCAA tournament games, but we’ve found that not only do so-called experts always go for the chalk and predict that three one-seeds will make the Final Four, they also have terrible hygiene habits. Fun fact: The ESPN College GameDay crew doesn’t even use toilets, they piss and shit indiscriminately wherever they happen to be. Their green room is disgusting. So we decided to go with a much cleaner, and more intelligent game picker: Olive the Hairless Cat. Here’s her predictions for Thursday’s games, along with the occasional behind-the-scenes look at her deliberation process:
Wichita State (5) vs. VCU (12)
Wichita State has decent “length,” as a scout and/or a groupie would say, but VCU is the home of GWAR and went far in last year’s tourney. Both teams are pretty exciting and one will go home unhappy, unless, that is, GWAR is on the flight home. This should be one of the better draws in the round.
Olive’s pick: VCU
Indiana (4) vs. New Mexico State (13)
It’s pretty crazy to think that no one knows where the term “Hoosier” came from.
Olive’s pick: Indiana
Olive’s pick for VCU vs. Indiana on Saturday: VCU
Murray State (6) vs. Colorado State (11)
Colorado State’s offense is a bit better than Murray State’s, but its defense is much, much worse. And Murray State has a fun name. It’s like calling a school University of Steve.
Jeremy Lin’s rise has resembled that of a rapper making magazine covers off of one YouTube single. The hype has been immense, though warranted. If this kid’s name were Ira Stein, a Jewish sports network would already be on Cablevision. He’s been so universally loved that it was a little bit surprising when he finally got booed last weekend, appropriately enough in Boston, home of the Celtics and thousands of angry guys who go by nicknames.
Knicks fans deserve something good after so many years of horrible management. Being a New York team, however, the Knickerbockers partially exist to be loathed by the rest of America. Until now, opposing fans have greeted Lin with a mixture of rapture and respect, because, c’mon dude, how you gonna hate this? As of right now the Knicks hold the eight-seed for the Eastern Conference playoffs. If their three-game lead holds, come spring, Lin’s Knicks will be playing Chicago, Orlando, and/or Miami, and they’ll turn from feel-good story to an actual team opposing fans should think bad thoughts about. It’s time the rest of the league takes Boston’s cue and learns how to boo this guy—without resorting to “there’s a chink in the fortune cookie”-style racism.
He’s Like a Dweeb Jeter Like Lin, everyone is supposed to say nice things about the Yankee captain (usually involving—barf—“intangibles”), though at this point Lin can only dream of being Jeter. Some similarities already exist: Both are smart on their feet, and both make plays that they shouldn’t be able to. Also like Jeetz, Lin has a lame policeman-style haircut. The two share a love for ill-fitting pants, too: Jeter’s butt-enhancing, high-wasted pinstripes are scary tight, while Lin’s XL 90s-rapper-shorts aren’t as bad, but like everything else about Lin, you could hardly call them “cool.” Lacking the suaveness and class of Jeter—or even Joe Namath—Lin does not (as of yet) send each girl he sexes home with signed memorabilia. Lin, 23, is a serious Christian, and might even be a virgin, which means…
He Might be as Bad as Tebow Wait, another evangelical-Christian-out-of-nowhere wonder story? Crucify me. Jeremy Lin’s bracelet reads “In Jesus’ Name I Play” and he has expressed interest in becoming a pastor. At Palo Alto High, Lin was a member of the Christian Club that opposed gay pride week, according to people who attended school with him. Lin’s mother worked the PTA circuit to block the establishment of a Gay-Straight Alliance, and back then he also said evolution was “just a theory.”
(God, why can’t there be a Satanic sports star, just once? Some evil guy from Spokane with an upside-down cross tattooed on his neck who hits .400 while fighting charges for heroin possession. After homering he kisses his Pentagram necklace and smears lamb’s blood on his bat for luck. Lord, please no more Christian sports miracle workers.)
Sex, one of the world’s dumber sayings goes, is like pizza, in that it’s great when it’s great and still good when it’s bad. There are adults who say this—right now, a ponytailed manager at a GameStop is saying it to his young employees in hopes of convincing them that he has experience in both; Dr. Drew, who is technically an adult-appearing marzipan-skinned insincerity droid, wrote said words in Oprah’s magazine; there are thousands of people in a Facebook group celebrating the expression.
For people who exist on a diet comprised exclusively of bad sex and bad pizza—Adam Carolla, Jay Mariotti, reality-show contestants on VH1—this may seem witty or true. But it’s not true: bad sex is sort of terrible, and bad pizza is incalculably worse, especially those slices with ziti on them. Sex is not like pizza in the way pizza is supposed to be like sex. The week before the NCAA Tournament, however, is like pizza in the way pizza is supposed to be like sex. That is, it’s sometimes—even often—sort of terrible, but it is also and always enjoyable, and sometimes great. There is also a disconcerting association to be made here with regard to Papa John’s, whose founder often shows up during college basketball commercial breaks, testifying to the camera how much fresh peppers and “real meats” mean to him personally, in an earnest tone most people reserve for proposals of marriage. But back to our metaphor.
For something all of them agree that No One Cares About, sport-pundit types tend to get awfully riled up by the NBA’s All-Star Weekend. Some mustard-stained grump-o local newspaper columnist will fret over a perceived uptick in crime for the host city, and national columnists will draw up whimsical plans for “saving” the game, or the weekend, or the NBA itself—which, despite record revenues and high ratings, is another thing they are certain No One Cares About. Radio guys will be odious and wrong and dead certain about some shit they obviously don’t care about. ESPN’s Bill Simmons should be counted on for another wide-eyed, faintly skeeve-inducing Safari Among the Urban People domestic travelogue, and fearless Fox Sports truth-teller Jason Whitlock (last seen in this space fearlessly telling jokes about Asian men’s peeners) might run one of his NBA All-Star Weekend Makes Me Despair for the Future of My Race columns up the troll-pole and see who salutes. For something that so definitively doesn’t matter, the NBA’s All-Star Game still makes some people pretty pissy.
If love is something that makes you more than a little crazy, something that makes it impossible to think about the beloved in any kind of objective way, then I guess I love my hometown Seattle sports teams. When I am not in the throes of romance, I’m cynical enough to know that pro sports are played by millionaires who are paid by billionaires, none of whom give a damn about me. Most of the players don’t choose to live in a city where the two seasons are “summer” and “rainy,” and they play for owners so miserly that they created ”20”-ounce cups that held 16 ounces of (overpriced) liquid. Still, when the Sonics left Seattle in 2008, I felt the bad news settle in my stomach like I had just gotten a call from my mom telling me that my dog had died. I know that sounds overwrought if you don’t care about sports, but I couldn’t help it—just like I can’t help being thrilled, pathetically and irrationally, now that there’s a chance the Sonics might come back.
In terms of how it gets used—which is often and poorly and carelessly enough to have legally assaulted “meaning”—the word hipster currently means something like “youngish city-dwelling white person with interests.” Though again, “meaning” is not quite the right word here. Hipster as it’s used refers to a specific type of person that likes a specific type of thing, and because Our Dumbest whites can’t stop giggle-shrieking the word long enough to figure out the type of person or thing in question, what we’re talking about is more less a word than mere sound. And anyway, once a term has become a laugh track cue on a B-grade sitcom—where it is used to rip on people who wear knit caps at seasonally inappropriate times (Kid Rock) and listen to Coldplay (your aunt)—it’s best to take it to the vet, say one last goodbye to the hobbling and slobbery old guy, and put it to sleep. All of which is to say that there is something faintly ridiculous about the idea that the NBA has a hipster issue.
The NBA makes people angry. Some people, not all, and generally not anyone you’d want to sit next to on either a long or short bus ride, but it makes a goodly number quite angry. This is not entirely the NBA’s fault, of course. This great nation is rich in these types of hemorrhoidal squeakers—the sort of people who won’t watch a sport they claim to like because they are pissed that uneasily retired backcourt hump Larry Hughes owns a bunch of fancy cars.
And that’s fine—life is difficult, and if fuming heartily about how some bullshit abstraction is ruining your happiness is what gets you through your commute, then by all means fume on that. But please, if that is who and how you are, both about the NBA and in general—please, please do not buy a NBA basketball team.
It’s too late, of course. People just like that already own NBA teams, and comprise the hard-line faction that forced the lockout and shaped the league’s ultimatum-intensive negotiation approach. These are people likesupremely Arizonan grievance machine and ace money-inheritor Robert Sarver and buffoonish mortgage-biz billionaire Dan Gilbert, who is best known for writing a MySpace-y kiss-off letter (in Comic Sans, naturally) to LeBron James after James left Gilbert’s Cavaliers to take his talents, vanities and designer sunglass collection to South Beach. The hardliners also count among their ranks the puffy, depressing, present-day Michael Jordan, who has transformed over the past dozen years from the world’s most beautiful athlete to an ulcer that somehow grew a mustache and developed a gambling addiction.
These small-minded men have ascended high enough that they now can—and would—burn down their own mansions to spite people they think are their enemies. Or, without the metaphor, they’d follow a season of record revenues by bullying their way into a non-season and no revenues at all because they felt it was too difficult for them to make money before.
