So, if you follow the NBA and very possibly even if you don't, you undoubtedly know that this is the Very Most Amazing Free Agent Class In NBA History. Quite an impressive collection is about to go on the open market. Chris Bosch. Dwayne Wade. Paul Pierce. And, of course, the very biggest of the big names. The King. LBJ. LeBron James.
I was always a fair-weather follower of the NBA, until I moved to Cleveland. Love them or hate them, and I love them, the Cleveland Cavaliers are a hell of a lot of fun to watch. And, love him or hate him, the biggest reason why is LeBron James. He's unbelievable. Physically, he's absolutely a beast. He does stuff that's just not possible. He has spent the past 6 years being this most sports-beleaguered of all cities' Great White Hope, the promise of the championship that Cleveland is finally going to get. And this year was going to be the year they finally did it. Brought home a ring. It would have been perfect, too. He's the hometown boy. He's intensely loyal and he loves this place. And although the fans of every city with an NBA franchise want him, and promise to love him forever if he will just come there, nobody loves him with the desperation of Clevelanders.
And so, tomorrow, the period of free agency begins. In reality, it began as soon as the Cavaliers were unceremonious eliminated from the playoffs in the second round (!) by the didn't-think-they-still-had-it-in-'em Celtics. LeBron, shockingly, didn't play all that well by his standards, and essentially didn't show up at all in the pivotal Game 5. He looked like he did something we around here have almost never seen him do--choked. This year's loss was far more painful than the last three--last year and two years ago in the conference finals, three years ago in the championship finals, those were painful but there was definite hope there. Now, it seems, there's none.
A month and a half ago, most people assumed LeBron would be staying in Cleveland, even if they didn't bring home a championship to this starved city. Now, most people assume he's leaving, and though opinions vary as to where people think he'll go the betting favorite is division rival Chicago. Hard to say whether that would be good or not. Everybody was raving about what a great ensemble Cleveland had finally managed to put around LeBron this year, too, until they once again didn't win. I was having this discussion with a Chicago-based friend of mine not too long ago, who said that if he came to Chicago, LeBron would be Superman. Pffft. He's already Jesus here. Almost literally. The building across from the Q has a 3-story high picture of LeBron on the side, head pointed skyward and arms outstretched. I always say that it's not by accident that they made him look like Jesus. Superman would be a downgrade. Plus, let's face it--it's too soon after their amazing run. Unless LeBron wins 7 or 8 championships in Chicago, and he won't, he's never going to be Michael Jordan. Chicago fans may love him, and without a doubt they want him to go there, but he can't be Jordan in Chicago. He's got a healthy ego but on some level he has to know that.
I don't know what he should do, honestly. I hope he stays, but really, I can't take much more of The Summer Of LeBron. If he's going to break up, he should just do it quickly and not string us along. And the broken-hearted city with the massive inferiority complex can move along--and hope against hope that maybe the Browns won't suck this year.
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Saturday, June 5, 2010
I Have Some Issues
Or, "Can I be a feminist and still like to listen to sports radio?"
This post started life as a long, penetrating dissertation on sports and gender relations in society. It worked in Tiger Woods, Ben Roethlisberger, Lawrence Taylor, Yeardley Love (the LaCrosse player allegedly murdered by her boyfriend), sports radio, and beer commercials. But, it was too much and kind of boring. Maybe I'll break it down into several different posts. Or, maybe I'll only get around to this one rant.
So I listen to a lot of sports radio. Really, it's not good for my brain but it's fun. I like listening to sports pundits better than I like listening to political ones. Sports Guys are frequently smart and well-informed, and even though they also frequently aren't, when they aren't then at least the silly gossip-mongering is relatively harmless.
I should make a few things clear from the outset. First, when I listen to sports radio, I'm not looking for lefty political correctness (in fact, sports fandom cuts so thoroughly across political lines that sports talk radio in general is studiously apolitical, because it has to be). I'm certainly not looking for a Take Back the Night rally or serious discussions of female empowerment. When I want those things, I know where to find them, and it's definitely not on ESPN, and I'm fine with that. Second, I'm not actually all that easily offended anymore. That's probably a function of my job. I've been a criminal lawyer for so many years and seen so many serious outrages against people (done both by and to my clients) that having some lawyer or judge call me "Sweetheart" barely even registers on the Slight Annoyance Meter anymore. Plus, it's still true that the legal field is majority male, if no longer overwhelmingly so. Being able to be "one of the guys" and put up with a certain amount of locker room talk has been pretty adaptive behavior in my line of work.
Lastly, I understand that I'm not the primary demographic for sports talk radio. If women, particularly women over 40, represent much more than 15 or 20% of the listening audience, I'd be pretty surprised. So, let's be conservative and estimate that 90% of the listening audience is male and the other 10% is female.
Still, it's also fair to assume (just extrapolating from the percentages of the general population and the demographics of this area) that somewhere in the neighborhood of one-third of the listening audience is non-white. And in the neighborhood of ten percent of the listening audience is (gasp!) gay. But it goes without saying that anyone in sports radio making any public comment that's even close to racially offensive would be instantly fired, or at least loudly reprimanded and forced to apologize publicly. And regardless of what individual personalities' attitudes might be about gay folks, homophobic remarks aren't considered OK anymore either. If some local sports team were to make a trade that the host considered bad or run a play that was boneheaded, it would not be OK for that host to describe it as "gay." And yet, gender-based insults are rampant in sports radio and I admit it's kind of starting to bug the crap out of me. The whole bit about insulting men by referring to them as women is starting to make me tired. It's not considered OK to call something "gay" as a pejorative term (and it should go without saying that I agree it isn't OK), but it's more than OK to insult guys by calling them girls.
Can we please be done with that? I'm kind of over that horseshit. I've heard that insult all my life. I don't want to get mad and fly in a huff over it and be the stereotypical feminist (Joke: How many feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb? Answer: THAT'S NOT FUNNY!!). But still, really, enough already. Maybe women aren't the majority of the listening audience, but some of us are listening. When you use my entire gender as the basis to insult someone, why does it never for one nanosecond occur to you that I might find that, well, insulting?
In the scheme of things I admit this is pretty minor. As I said, my much deeper and more far-reaching discussion of this petered out. But seriously, it is totally possible to discuss--ad nauseum, in fact--whether LeBron James is going to stay in Cleveland without behaving like a bunch of giggling fifth-grade boys insulting the girls. And some of the girls might want to listen, boys.
This post started life as a long, penetrating dissertation on sports and gender relations in society. It worked in Tiger Woods, Ben Roethlisberger, Lawrence Taylor, Yeardley Love (the LaCrosse player allegedly murdered by her boyfriend), sports radio, and beer commercials. But, it was too much and kind of boring. Maybe I'll break it down into several different posts. Or, maybe I'll only get around to this one rant.
So I listen to a lot of sports radio. Really, it's not good for my brain but it's fun. I like listening to sports pundits better than I like listening to political ones. Sports Guys are frequently smart and well-informed, and even though they also frequently aren't, when they aren't then at least the silly gossip-mongering is relatively harmless.
I should make a few things clear from the outset. First, when I listen to sports radio, I'm not looking for lefty political correctness (in fact, sports fandom cuts so thoroughly across political lines that sports talk radio in general is studiously apolitical, because it has to be). I'm certainly not looking for a Take Back the Night rally or serious discussions of female empowerment. When I want those things, I know where to find them, and it's definitely not on ESPN, and I'm fine with that. Second, I'm not actually all that easily offended anymore. That's probably a function of my job. I've been a criminal lawyer for so many years and seen so many serious outrages against people (done both by and to my clients) that having some lawyer or judge call me "Sweetheart" barely even registers on the Slight Annoyance Meter anymore. Plus, it's still true that the legal field is majority male, if no longer overwhelmingly so. Being able to be "one of the guys" and put up with a certain amount of locker room talk has been pretty adaptive behavior in my line of work.
Lastly, I understand that I'm not the primary demographic for sports talk radio. If women, particularly women over 40, represent much more than 15 or 20% of the listening audience, I'd be pretty surprised. So, let's be conservative and estimate that 90% of the listening audience is male and the other 10% is female.
Still, it's also fair to assume (just extrapolating from the percentages of the general population and the demographics of this area) that somewhere in the neighborhood of one-third of the listening audience is non-white. And in the neighborhood of ten percent of the listening audience is (gasp!) gay. But it goes without saying that anyone in sports radio making any public comment that's even close to racially offensive would be instantly fired, or at least loudly reprimanded and forced to apologize publicly. And regardless of what individual personalities' attitudes might be about gay folks, homophobic remarks aren't considered OK anymore either. If some local sports team were to make a trade that the host considered bad or run a play that was boneheaded, it would not be OK for that host to describe it as "gay." And yet, gender-based insults are rampant in sports radio and I admit it's kind of starting to bug the crap out of me. The whole bit about insulting men by referring to them as women is starting to make me tired. It's not considered OK to call something "gay" as a pejorative term (and it should go without saying that I agree it isn't OK), but it's more than OK to insult guys by calling them girls.
Can we please be done with that? I'm kind of over that horseshit. I've heard that insult all my life. I don't want to get mad and fly in a huff over it and be the stereotypical feminist (Joke: How many feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb? Answer: THAT'S NOT FUNNY!!). But still, really, enough already. Maybe women aren't the majority of the listening audience, but some of us are listening. When you use my entire gender as the basis to insult someone, why does it never for one nanosecond occur to you that I might find that, well, insulting?
In the scheme of things I admit this is pretty minor. As I said, my much deeper and more far-reaching discussion of this petered out. But seriously, it is totally possible to discuss--ad nauseum, in fact--whether LeBron James is going to stay in Cleveland without behaving like a bunch of giggling fifth-grade boys insulting the girls. And some of the girls might want to listen, boys.
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