So I’ve lost my right to blog about basketball. I’m not longer engaged in the primary source, the text of the sport, and am instead resigned to taking your word for it. A handful of podcasts, a box score or two, this is how we keep in touch.
Am I seeing the same NBA as you? I am not. Can I be as objective about it as you, or bring forth original insights? I cannot. Perhaps, in my position, I am only qualified to tell you what it’s like from “over there,” and how we might spread our dear league to the world.
The sport itself, as you probably know well, is portable. Buy a ball and it’s easy enough to put up hoops, to find three other people. And foreigners do play. Foreigners even call “Kobe” at appropriate times. It does not need explaining that anyone, anywhere “can.”
Deficiencies abound. We probably don’t know what happened in that game last night. We might, if you’re very lucky, know that the Wizards are doing well, or that Tom Thibodeau is a good defensive coach. Here in Israel, nearly everyone knows more or less what David Blatt is up to, understandably, but that’s the most detailed knowledge you’ll find.
Yet many understand the basics of basketball. A random weeknight walk past the park, you’ll find Orthodox Jewish men and boys in black suits backing each other down in the post. The Maccabi Tel Aviv win dominated the papers for three solid days afterward, and this was during the tumult leading up to Operation Defensive Edge. Clearly, sports and basketball in particular matter.
But somewhere between shores the game becomes estranged from itself. Here they know names of greats, and some mythological qualities they possess: LeBron can drive like a train, Rondo has a quality no-look assist. They know very few concrete facts, and this somehow adds to the beauty. Performances pass into legend with no one checking the facts. You, basketball blogger, create this reality for them.
In the same way a young man from Tel Aviv reads stories about D.C. and Bad Brains, and places himself there and fabricates his reality of the way things must have been, in some ways better, in some ways worse, so we wreathe basketball in our own particular fictions, here. For all we know, John Wall never hit a three point shot in his whole career. We exaggerate, we simplify, and we build it all from you.
So consider us, when you don’t know what you’re writing, or why you’re doing it, or if it’s worth it. We here, of the less fortunate time zones, need you. You feed our myths. You bring us the basketball from the sacred lands, incalculably better than our own, though we couldn’t exactly explain why.
