Rondo and the Old Dudes Just Keep Winning

Watching sports as an adult requires a suspension of criticism. Scratch that—watching sports as an adult requires you to let slide a lot of shit you would never let slide with other entertainments. The narrow world of sports is full of dullard broadcasters and no-necks concussing each other and undiagnosed Asperger-level savants who spend thousands of hours analyzing the efficiency of said no-necks. The amount of brain cells and dignity we sacrifice when we watch sports sometimes surpasses what even a pop punk fan would tolerate.

Now, that’s not to say sports are “bad.” They’re better than anything else that’s free, for one, and about a thousand times realer. If you are young and want to learn about the world, watch sports: How do people act on the job? How can I tell if someone’s sad? What’s it look like when someone thinks on his feet? And for the non-jaded, well-schooled fan, sports offers a never-ending well of subtle delights and smaller aesthetic triumphs, the kinds of beautiful things which can only be delivered by insanely driven and talented people, and the realness of which makes you understand why so many people care about this stuff in the first place. Watch any professional sporting event, even one involving the Mighty Ducks or an AL Central baseball team, and you’ll be a real-time witness aesthetic triumph.

But not everyone is into that. There’s a massive amount of writing that reduces sports to a chillingly average enterprise. Journalists will declare, in farewell columns or in interviews, their work is about people, and the best stories are about the most interesting people who happen to be athletes, who came from rough or banal neighborhoods, who can run very fast, who don’t beat their wives anymore, who learned to pitch sideways or whatever. They say that their skills at sports both don’t matter and show us that we, too, can stop drinking bleach and run up mountains on our days off.

Of course, chances are you’re not like any of these athletes. I know I barely am. The gulf between my world and an athlete’s—even cool ones who ride longboards or collect corny sneakers or listens to bad heavy metal—is a chasm. And the “athlete as regular Joe” profiles, despite the very real universal life experience vibes they tap into, do very little to bridge that chasm. It’s not that right fielders, or point guards, or a fencer, or a checking center should be seen and not heard, it’s just that there have been so many of the same kind of stories written about them that they’ve become easy to tune out. Of course, access isn’t what it used to be, and it’s hard for anyone who has a demanding job to sit down and get really real. Still, athletes hardly seem human. They’re memes maybe, or stat-generating machines, or cordoned-off stereotypes so well-worn and cloistered off that they are hardly human, and the human ones hardly seem worth dignifying.

There are times, though, when a sporting event really does seem to be about people, or people you think you know. That was the case with the Celtics’ victory last night over an overripe and rotten Heat team. Boston entered the series decrepit, with Kevin Bar Fight! Garnett limping worse than Vladimir Guerrero, Ray Allen looking old and cold, and Paul Pierce on the rough end of a trademark but longer-than-usual lousy shooting streak. Their defense was still world-class, or close to it, but they could barely put the ball into the hoop. At times during the series, it was Rajon Rondo, on cheat-code, scoring and facilitating with 11 warm bodies. If the Celtics had a non-alien point guard, they would have been swept. Boston won because their defense is special—that and Pierce’s late three-pointer—though that’s not what sticks out from this game.

The team, on its face, hasn’t been much different than the one we’ve watched for the past five seasons. There have been personnel swaps, but nothing really key. The Big Three have turned into Rondo and the Old Dudes, but it’s the same team. Compared to the rest of the playoff field, they seem plodding—no traveling media circus like with the Heat, none of the Thunder’s youth and insane talent, or the Spurs’ casual, half-ignored dominance. They’re too old to keep this up—right? They were a team of veteran stars coming together for One Last Big Score five years ago, for fuck’s sake. You wonder if there’s something intrinsic these old guys have that others don’t—do they give more of a shit about the games than their media-mogul opponents? Is KG’s noted/ridiculed intensity 100 percent for real? Does it give him an edge, and should we all check ourselves?  In any case, I want to meet them. I think. I’d like to hear what they have that, say, the Clippers lack—or which, potentially, Miami lacks. I’d say this Boston team is what we watch all year and wait for, but it’s not. You’d go broke and lose personality watching all those games. But it’s worth appreciating something real when it comes around.

@samreiss_