The Universe Came for Patty Mills

Sports are unfair. Sometimes they are unfair in a way that seems like an argument for sports as a societal net-negative—a franchise threatens to move out of town if a city won't fund 65 percent of a new stadium project, say—and other times a referee is a complete idiot. This would be unremarkable but for the fact that popular thought about sports has an egalitarian streak that, say, the discourse about art lacks. (You don't hear much about critical objectivity anymore.) We are, for whatever reason, obsessed with making our sports fair, and because sports are a rules-based thing—what is a game but a set of things you can and cannot do with your body and/or some piece of equipment? There is the illusion we can render them fair if we tweak the regulations in precisely the right way.

We labor to make sure individual contests are fair—we occasionally halt play so an official can look at a monitor and determine whether or not the outer edge of a shooting guard's sneaker glanced the sideline—and we try to create superstructures for our leagues that prevent a single team from becoming overpoweringly great. The NBA's most recent collective bargaining agreement was primarily about getting players to give up a big chunk of revenue, but David Stern and his cohorts sold the CBA, in the aftermath of the lockout, as a victory for small-market teams and competitive balance.

As much as we fret and throw dump trucks of psychic energy at it—settle the fuck down, anti-tankers—the unfairness of sports is not a fixable thing. Most rules are vulnerable to subversion, and anyway, sometimes cosmic left hooks catch you on the jaw, and no legislation can save you. Sometimes you are Patty Mills.

The 25-year-old Australian was set to get paid this summer, coming off a year in which he scored 10.2 points per game and shot 42.5 percent from three on a title-winning squad. Mills is no force of nature. He's a waterbug-ish point guard who doesn't play like one, mostly hanging out off the ball, near the perimeter. He's probably the exact sort of player who fits in remarkably well with the Spurs, and whom we wouldn't give much thought if he played in Toronto, but he's worth more than the $1.1 million he received in 2013-14. The list of teams who could use a bench guard who can pass and doesn't miss open threes is long.

On July 10th, free agents are permitted to sign whatever contract suits them best. On July 2nd, news broke that Mills has a torn right rotator cuff, and he's going to be rehabbing it for the next seven months. The injury is likely to cost a guy who has never made a ton of money at least a few million dollars.

There is not much to do in the face of something like this other than feel bad for Mills and mutter a few curses skyward. Brian Phillips wrote a wonderfully bleary and morose game recap last postseason about the Thunder crashing out of the playoffs against the Memphis Grizzlies. It's a kind of bloom-off-the-rose tale about OKC and their fans finally feeling the burden of expectation and the disappointment of coming up short of it. (In part because of an injury to Russell Westbrook. The universe's entropy is stronger than even Westbrook's.) The article concludes with a familiar lament, one we've all uttered in the face of a bad loss: "Sports are the worst. Sports suck. I hate sports."

And man, sports do suck, in ways big and small. The way Phillips was talking about them sucking is relatively insignificant—it's fan pain, which is barely real—compared to Mills's injury, which is in turn dwarfed by the sorts of injustices suffered by, say, impoverished Latin American soccer phenoms or former NFL players who died demented and alone. And then there is what has happened to Brazil's poor population because of the World Cup. Sports are unfair because they are part of the real world, and the real world is a wood chipper.

Once we realize this, our myopia is laid bare. We are, in concerning ourselves with making sports impossibly perfect, trying to finish a LEGO set as our home burns down around us. One of the most appealing qualities of a game is that it matters without mattering. It is something to get sucked into that we can, in theory, easily return from. But because it is a temporary respite from—sharp exhale here—everything else, we devote this deranged amount of effort into making sure games are as unlike the space we inhabit for the other 21 hours of the day as possible.

This is foolish, if completely understandably so. But with startling regularity, tragedies minor and major come along and disrupt our precious project. They remind us that sports—the people who play them, the fans who care about them, the cities that house them—are as fragile and doomed as anything else. They remind us not to worry so much, or to worry in a different direction. Because we can make sports better, but we can never make them fair. That's asking them to be something reality won't brook.