NBA Fan at an Existential Crossroads Part iii: Bobby and Stacey
https://open.spotify.com/track/3Ud7XgzFZ8LTrisZXscq3T?si=kxe1aueLTTyyIzThpqwiOA
The question of what the NBA is today is obviously inextricably tied up with what it has been throughout the past. And what it is has always been about who its star players are. At the time of writing this as an NBA fan I feel stuck in a curious state of limbo. On one end I am impatiently anticipating the return of the postponed season, which is not slated to restart for another two months. But I’m also struck by a strong sense of history courtesy of ESPNs myth making “The Last Dance” (dir. Jason Hehir, 2020) documentary, which chronicles the story of Michael Jordan and the 90s Bulls dynasty. As the league struggles against a seemingly endless series of problems afflicting its restart plan “The Last Dance” serves as a reminder of how much the league and the sport have changed, far beyond the aesthetic qualities of the on-court product.
The modern NBA experienced its first big breakthrough in the 80s with the arrival of two generational players in Larry Bird and Magic Johnson. Over the course of the decade these two titans, and their rivalry, would help define and contextualize the future of professional basketball, framing every player, team, and evolution of the game that came along after them in the context of their own exploits. But despite having a rich and long history prior to the 1980s few outside of local market basketball aficionados cared much for the NBA. I think the term I’m looking for is “bush league”. The arrival of Bird and Magic would help launch the NBA into a sphere of cultural relevance previously only occupied by football and baseball, cementing the game’s place in American pop culture.
Just a little historical perspective for the ignorant among ye of little hoops knowledge — seriously though imagine not knowing about viewership numbers in 1970s pro basketball, what do you have lives or something? — the 1979 NBA Finals were aired on tape delay and continually suffered from limited interest outside of the host team’s cities. Hardly the description of a robust product. The professional game suffered from a number of maladies, all of which were related to how it was marketed, that at the time appeared to sound its death knell. Funnily enough, throughout the 1970s viewership numbers for college basketball showed nothing but growth and a huge interest in the game of basketball.
The 1979 NCAA championship game — between who else? Magic and Bird — stands in stark butt naked contrast to that summer’s NBA finals. The NCAA championship broadcast helped ESPN stick their foot in the door of the broadcasting industry and guaranteed its future as the sports powerhouse we know today. ESPN’s first round coverage that year would create the now immensely profitable “March Madness” tournament, while the Bird and Magic’s face-off embodied everything that makes basketball such an attractive and profitable product.
Personalities shine through in a basketball game. The narratives and drama, building blocks of myth, write themselves and all broadcasters have to do is sell it. The key to college broadcasters’s success in the 1970’s was their simple discovery that creating regional rivalries between teams in different parts of the country lead to sudden spikes in interest and in viewers. Rivalries.
It is by no means a stretch to see parallels between gladiatorial fighting in ancient Rome — a sprawling republic, that is an empire in all but name, that buckles under its own weight trying to maintain its unity, whose society increasingly engages in the satisfaction of decadent and indulgent appetites — and pro sports in America. We are all modern Caligulas lounging in our Klinai’s, a fistful of grapes in one hand and in the other passing judgement with an e-thumbs up or down.
Because not just any rivalry will satisfy the modern audience’s bloodlust for glorified conflict as a 1978 Sports Illustrated article points out. In 1977 the NBA Finals between two dynamic players — Bill Walton and Julius Erving — culminated in all-time highs for its Nielsen Ratings. The next year a 22% drop in ratings coincided with 5 of its 6 major market franchises being totally irrelevant to the season’s overarching narrative. Those markets were Boston, Chicago, New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. To this day they remain the same. If you were to look at a map you would notice that all of these cities are strategically geographically positioned, encompassing pretty much the entire country and most importantly cornering its major urban areas where historically the majority of the country’s wealth resides.
The United States can’t help but be defined by its regional differences. Nearly two hundred years after 1865 the country remains distinctly demarcated along a north/south divide, which overtime has transformed into a color divide: red v. blue. black and white. rich and poor. The significance of the role the NBA’s major markets play on the league’s fortunes is as pronounced as they ever were. Because in those regional divisions unaffiliated viewers create national constituencies for dominant clubs.
The NBA can be defined by its most historied rivalry: Lakers v. Celtics. Magic versus Bird. And how those two played on the court, was as much a representation of who they were as people and where they came from. The charismatic Johnson, all flair and flashy passes, helped create the myth of the “Showtime Lakers”, Hollywood, Black. Bird, humble and perfect fundamentals, the perfect embodiment of Indiana team basketball, White. These are stereotypes that are still prevalent to this day! The white dude who shoots and the black guy who has crazy handles.
Because independently from the Barthesian myth that the NBA is constructing for itself it has also always been sure to build more traditional mythologies around the game and its players as part of the same process. French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss characterizes all mythology as defined by a dialectic nature, we make up myths to make sense of the chaos that is life and all its seemingly unrelated events. As a result of trying to reconcile the unrelated we conclude that in its un-relation it all, somehow, has to be related. And our imagination traps us into thinking that life is made up of dualisms. But with each new dualism that is produced a mediating term is created between the two and that mediation is itself defined by its own duality. Myth is a language, it requires vast referential knowledge for infinite permutations. How are you going to say “hello” to someone without knowing what “h” and “o” mean?
Sports journalism has long fulfilled the role of both the historian and the myth maker. And who is to say there is a difference between the two, history is nothing but a narrative. So, within the mythology the NBA created around the narratives surrounding its players and teams the only way fans can make sense of it is by contextualizing it against every other narrative they encounter in life. Bird and Magic’s success-every NBA finals between 1980 and 1990 featured one of the two — defined what the standard of success in the NBA is not just to this day but they also arguably reframe everything leading up to them. The NBA had no shortage of stars before these two came along but Bird and Magic? These guys had commercials. And commercials make superstars. Just like that it’s not about basketball anymore, it’s about everything but. The future beckons.
“Hello…?”
…
“The NBA? No, one second”
…
“Here, it’s for you.”
https://open.spotify.com/track/3LklW07tvdx2AHsgfi1Mng?si=cTLy1OSBQ16n6PSCNrqk1w
