February 5^th – February 11^th

-Rob Gronkowski celebrates a loss (February 5^th): Only hours losing Super Bowl 46, Patriots tight end Rob Gronkowski was seen dancing at a club with his shirt off.  Much was made of Gronk’s shirtless gallivanting after the loss, but everyone’s surprise only proves how different the public’s perception is from the actual goings on of professional sports leagues.  The Super Bowl, already a shit-storm of a spectacle, is little more than a week long party for those not involved in the game.  The media is more circus-like than usual and most players bask in the attention.  Sure, there’s a game to be played, and professionals take that seriously, but athletes don’t just perform for the sake of performance.  They do it for notoriety, for money, or attention.  The “teamwork” mechanics of sports are just a necessary means to those ends, and they don’t carry over to the personal realm.  There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Gronkowski, who had just put up a ballsy performance on one good leg, just because he didn’t feel like killing himself after the Super Bowl.  He, like every other player, missed out on the week-long party, and once his duties as a player were over, he sought out that party.  I don’t see what’s so surprising about that.  The last game of the season is like the last day of school in some regards.  Though players do their best to sustain a season as long as possible with hard work and focused determination, they surely aren’t going to be glum about their upcoming time off.  Who hates a vacation?  Gronk was just doing his best Dazed and Confused impression, running around like a senior on the last day of school, looking for somewhere to party and some freshmen ass to paddle.  It’s also worth noting that Gronkowski isn’t Tom Brady: he’s only 22 years old, has been photographed hanging out with porn stars, and just completed an MVP-like season, breaking almost every record ever held by a tight end.  If I was him, I might sling my shirt off and throw down a little too – Super Bowl win or not.

-Jeremy Linsanity: Taking the basketball world by storm, Lin is yet another reminder of how entrenched stereotypes are.  While most people would claim they find Lin interesting for his ability to lead an underachieving team to a 5 game win streak – which would attribute Linsanity to fascination with actual basketball skill – the truth is that it’s fascinating to see a skinny Asian kid, who went to Harvard no less, tearing up the African-American dominated NBA.  It’s the same feeling I got watching Jimmer Fredette at BYU last year: it was obvious the kid had skills, but it was only noteworthy because a little white guy was scoring all those points.  If a black kid had been firing up shots at the rate Fredette was, most of America wouldn’t have taken much notice.  The top scorer in college basketball usually comes from some lesser university that allows one player to jack up 30 shots a game.  But can you name the last five players who led the nation in scoring?  Could you name one, besides Fredette?  Jimmer-mania was the same as Linsanity: it just looks different seeing an atypical type of person doing atypical things.  Lin’s production is even more staggering because it seemingly came out of nowhere.  Most people fail to realize that Lin has been on the Knicks all season.  After 22 games – 13 of which Lin didn’t even play a single minute – he was averaging under 2 points a game.  But it isn’t just the singular production: it’s leading a team in disarray to a five game winning streak – which makes Lin’s production actually matter.  If he was putting up sick numbers on a team that was still losing, like tons of players on Golden State or Sacramento over the past ten years, this whole phenomena would be easier to explain.  After all, the Knicks are playing without Amare or Carmelo, who take the vast majority of the shots.  With them out, the Knicks frequently start players like Jared Jeffries and Bill Walker alongside defensive-minded players like Landry Fields and Tyson Chandler.  I mean, SOMEONE has to take the shots and make the passes.  Statistics-wise, one could make the argument that Lin was just in the right place in the right time.  But from a win/loss perspective, this whole thing is harder to explain.  In the 13 games before Lin had his first start against the Nets, the Knicks were 2-11.  2 WINS AND 11 FUCKING LOSSES!  Then this Harvard-educated, mini-Yao comes in and rattles off 5 straight wins, scoring 25, 28, 23, 38, and 20 along the way.  Where there’s smoke, there’s fire – and the longer Lin keeps this up, the harder it is to say it’s just bullshit.  It may look strange – it’s easier to compare Jeremy Lin to Tim Tebow in terms of awkward game performance – but it works.  But for how long?  What happens when Carmelo and Amare get back?  How much of this is attributable to the other Knicks playing better?  All of these questions will keep me tracking Linsanity for the rest of the season.

-Kevin Love stomps on Luis Scola’s face (February 4^th): Technically this is from last week, but I didn’t see it until Sunday.  I’ve long had this habit of remembering scumbag basketball plays.  Because I’ve played thousands of games of basketball in my life, but never succumbed to outright trying to injure an opponent, I’ve always noted instances where other people have.  There’s nothing more pathetic than a cheap shot.  It’s cowardly and idiotic and disgusting.  Just last year, I wanted to jump into my television and attack Andrew Bynum for his cheap shot on JJ Barea in the playoffs.  I have a particularly vivid hatred of ball-punchers.  Notably, Aaron Brooks (who was suspended from the NCAA tournament for punching a player in the nuts) and Kevin Garnett (who unashamedly whacked Channing Frye in the nards last year) are recent examples.  But cheap shots take other forms as well (like when Robert Horry full-body checked Steve Nash into the scorer’s table or when Derek Fisher blindsided Luis Scola with a UFC shoulder charge).  Scola was once again the victim of dirty play when Kevin Love decided to start a fast break by stomping on the Argentinean’s face.  Love was given a two game suspension for the stomp.  This play wasn’t as outrageous as some of the other occurrences I’ve noted, and some people even claim it was unintentional, saying that Love’s foot got tangled and his momentum brought the foot down upon Scola’s mug.  The play certainly doesn’t look that malicious, but Love did the right thing and apologized publicly about the incident.  Playing dumb never works in the public eye, and Love took the blame like a man.  For this, people most likely will soon forget about it all together.  But really, people would have forgotten about it any way.  Most sports fans don't have a long memory for this type of thing.  Hell, people even forgot that Kobe raped a lady and Ray Lewis killed a dude.  That all-out brawl in Detroit years back has even been swept under the rug, and that was players attacking fans.  All fall, while Derek Fisher represented the player’s union in the Collective Bargaining Agreement discussions, I brought up his history of dirty plays and wondered how people could trust someone like that (his shoulder charge into Scola could probably be considered felony battery – it’s that vicious). But we forgive and forget all these things.  And if we make allowances for temporary moments of violence and lunacy in the sports world, why don’t we make allowances for average citizens?  Some people are behind bars for life for nothing but a spur-of-the-moment mistake.  Sure, there’s a difference between killing someone and just stepping on their face in a basketball game, but what if Love’s massive sneaker hit Scola’s head in just the wrong way, smacking it into the floor, and Scola ended up as a non-responsive vegetable?  Would Kevin Love be facing murder charges right now?  Maybe.  But I’m sure he’d make bail in time to play in the All-Star game.