This Is What Happens When We Invest Too Much Meaning into Sports
On Chauncey Billups, Becky Hammon, Neil Olshey, Damian Lillard, and the Media Circus Surrounding the Blazers’ Next Coach
Author’s Note: Because this touches on a lot of cultural issues and flashpoints, this piece is long. And because I occasionally write about sports for non-sports-fans, this article will contain a lot of explanation regarding what’s been happening with the Trail Blazers coaching search, why it matters, and who’s to blame. If you’re an internet-savvy fan of the NBA or the Portland Trail Blazers specifically, very little of this will be new information for you, so if you just want my take on what should happen moving forward, skip to the last section entitled “What Does This All Mean?” But if you’re not, then by all means, keep reading. It’s about sports, but it’s also about much, much more.
So, a few years after the controversy with Colin Kaepernick, it was a late fall evening, and I was on stage at a Portland-area comedy club, taking my turn doing stand-up at an open mic. Just for fun, I started with this one.
“So, any Seattle Seahawks fans here?”
*a smattering of applause*
“Yeah, I’ve been following the team and they just had a bad few games and now it looks like the playoffs might be out of reach. Which sucks for them, but at least now I can go back to boycotting the NFL.”
That’s the kind of joke that will only ever really kill in Portland because, in most other cities, there aren’t enough people who are media literate enough to follow the controversy surrounding the NFL without being heavily invested in actual NFL fandom. It’s the kind of joke you can tell in a city where the only major league sport is basketball, and everybody knows it.
It was also a bit of confession masquerading as sarcasm. I really did mean it when I promised not to support the league any longer, but yet here I was, still just as interested in Russell Wilson and Doug Baldwin and whether the secondary would be able to rebound from the Legion of Boom days. I wasn’t watching the games or spending any money…
