Reel Talk: Corbin Smith's Review of Online Basketball Highlights, Youth Market Edition

The NBA, the world's preferred basketball league (Minneapolis Rec needs to get off its high horse), has a NEW YouTube channel. It's called jr.nba! It is for youths, which you can tell because the name is all lowercase. Postmodern youths detest authority structures, especially those related to grammar and punctuation.

So far, jr.nba consists of some instructional videos, some drills, and some short documentaries about various aspects of the game. I wouldn't say any of these videos are a "dumbed-down" version of the NBA built for the eyes and ears and hearts of children, but only because mainstream sports discourse isn't exactly A Portrait of a Lady.

What is the NBA trying to impress on these young minds? I watched, and I reviewed.

Kevin Love appears at about the 30-second mark. "You don't have to be the most athletic guy in the world, the tallest guy in the world, to go out there and secure a rebound," he says. A clip of Manu Ginobili snatching a board, in traffic, one-handed, and dropping it back into the hoop as the announcer narrates: "He shot, he felt it, he went and got it." Love's voice returns: "A lot of that is just, you know, having heart, having hustle." Steph Curry puts a box out on Dwight Howard, who is now in the sort of place where he is most readily contextualized as a prop in Steph Curry's quest for excellence. Jeff Van Gundy cuts in: "I would carry this guy's bags if I was his coach."

It makes me sick, absolutely SICK to watch this rebounding propaganda film, and to know it is being shown to children. The most upsetting thing in basketball semiotics today is the fetishization, at all levels, of rebounding (and, more broadly, defense) as moral imperative—a test of character, the place where effort means more than anything else, the one thing you can't fake. My friends, that is some horseshit.

"Look there, son," says an old man, sitting in the stadium with his stupid grandson. "Look at that J.J. Hickson hustle. He has a nose for the ball." What the old man doesn't know, or say, or see, is that J.J. Hickson is fucking shitty at basketball. All he does is hunt for boards and give up layups. Actual big-man productivity involves absorbing space on defense, spreading the floor, boxing out, and putting management on edge about post touches—basically, it's keeping every other problem the team might have completely suppressed. Hunting for rebounds on your own like some handsome, rugged, virile bear looking to eat a filthy Leonardo DiCaprio is almost entirely useless.

Do not show your children this video.

I will concede that there are two decent things about it, though. One is that there is some great-looking slow-motion rebounding footage, even if the boards themselves are fundamentally useless. The other good thing is this:

REBOUNDING, A POEM BY TIM DUNCAN

Rebounding the ball

translates into wins.

Which is the biggest part

Of everything.

RATING: PROPAGANDISTIC GARBAGE

Both as a child and as an adult, I have fundamentally distrusted pretty much every male authority figure I have ever come into contact with. There's just something about some dude telling you what to do that is so grating. You can see the desperation on their faces every time, the yearning for control, the pursuit of a kind of extraordinary seriousness that will make everyone bow down and recognize that yes, the world is full of nattering ninnies who don't know what they're talking about, but you are a complete human male, the one we need, a real Joseph Campbell hero-type of motherfucker, the man who did it.

How could you not want to disassemble that every time you see it? Male self-importance is, truly, the cause of all troubles in the world. It makes me sick that someday, unless I really am completely unlovable, I will have a child, and I will impose whatever my self-definition of importance turns out to be on this otherwise innocent person. Which brings us to this:

So congratulations to my good personal friend, Dallas Mavericks coach Rick Carlisle, for managing not to seem like a desperate lunatic in this video where he teaches a bunch of kids a basic catch-and-shoot dribble. He passes off this information with a tone of pure, inviting technocratic authority.

You don't see any calls to moral action ("The catch-and-shoot is the most important play in basketball. To neglect developing your catch-and-shoot game would be a crime you commit against yourself. If you can't hang with this drill, you should take yourself to prison, because you're going to end up there anyway. Don't you understand how important this is!?"). Nothing like that. Even his "nice job" reads sincere. I really believed that kid did a good job, and that Rick Carlisle thought so.

Rick makes another kid shoot twice because he didn't lift the ball high enough, which feels like kind of nitpicky. Then again, maybe in Rick's head that little problem would spread, like a crack in the sidewalk, and eventually consume that kid's game. He was solving a big problem: male self-importance.

Rick's voice is relatively pleasing, if baffling: there's a hint of a hint of a Southern lilt, which makes no sense seeing as he's from upstate New York. I suppose that the many travels and trials of a life in basketball have molded his deportment over the years. He just sort of sounds like a coach, and that makes some sense.

I haven't had a chance to go out and apply Rick's advice, but I suspect that it's pretty good. We all shoot flat footed from time to time. Normal people can't let the strength of their wrists do all their shooting work for them. Only freaks can do that.

One last observation: if you listen really, really closely to the music, which got potted down in the mix something righteous, you can hear the track change at about, oh, 50 seconds. The music has a really bass-and-synths-thump-thump feel. I suspect, but cannot prove, that they shot this segment next door to a Dance Warehouse in the industrial part of Dallas and no matter what they did, they couldn't remove the slight background noise. Cheapos.

RATING: ONE ACCEPTABLE MALE AUTHORITY FIGURE

This is a video of Joey Crawford, the NBA's most (in)famous referee, telling kids about how to become a referee. I don't know what kid out there wants to be a referee. Maybe they REALLY like the NBA, and really want to be OUT THERE, but their self-estimation is so low, in a way that is admirably realistic: I'm too short! I'm not athletic enough! I need to pursue a trade that will work for me! That said, there's always something bummer-y about a pragmatic kid, and there's something in this assessment that's a little troubling: Why even try? Even at this tender age I know that I cannot ever become King of the Hill, and so I will become the lawyer of the hill instead!! I wish for the hatred of others, because I believe that I cannot acquire their love!

The video itself is built around an interview with Crawford, who is sitting on a couch in what appears to be a hotel room and wearing a bright yellow track jacket. His voice is turned all the way down and friendly, and as such will be unrecognizable to anyone who spends too much time watching NBA games. You can hear out front, in a way you can't when he's screaming during a game, a pronounced Philadelphia accent.

Crawford talks about the beginnings of his life as a referee: "My first weekend of refereeing, when I was a young kid, 18, 19 years old, I worked 13 games in a weekend. And it is imperative, imperative, to work fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grades, to work a million of those games." He doesn't seem nostalgic, per se, but there is a sense of genuine appreciation for a craft built from the ground up.

His eyes are so, so extremely blue. They look right into the camera.

When I signed up to write about Joey Crawford's words for children who for some reason want to be referees, I thought it was going to be, like, hilarious. It wasn't. It was humanizing. Old Joey Crawford, scampering up and down the court with his horrible posture, croaking out calls, maybe doing light work in settling his never-ending list of grudges and slights—that guy, whom I see on TV entirely too often, seems like a cartoon goblin. But the Joey Crawford sitting here, talking somewhat normally about his life, with his two giant-ass blue eyes—if you asked, I would have guessed Dark Black, like a monster—a thick-sliced Philly accent, and a silly track jack? That's a human being, through and through. I can practically smell him through my computer. (Pleasant, notes of sandalwood.)

If—and this is an enormous if, because I don't think anyone would join me—someone made a 100-minute long movie where Joey Crawford talked about his life and the biggest calls of his career, I would see it in a theater, alone and rapt before a 50-foot-tall Joey Crawford just staring into the camera and talking. I think it's the only medium in which we could see the real man. If he went on a national speaking tour, for instance, I think he would just revert to vamping; the whole enterprise would devolve into a one-man show about his greatest moments. But a gentle sit down with a filmmaker in control of his craft? I would want to see that. What I am saying is that I want Errol Morris to make a movie about Joey Crawford very much.

RATING: ONE CONE OF UNDERSTANDING

Thanks for reading! I'll be back next week with some gales of love and loss! Until then, KEEP HIGHLIGHTING!