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Now, before the NBA season started many media companies ran profiles about Scoot Henderson. At the time Henderson was projected to be one of the best rookies in the 23/24 NBA rookie class. Outside of Victor, he was a lock for number one, had it been any other year, the basketball scouts said, Scoot was a sure thing for rookie of the year.
The coverage on Scoot was familiar, not just because of the prognostications, which you become pretty used to as an NBA fan. I mean, in the last five or six years alone, there have been a few “sure things” not to pan out the way they were supposed to.
From the gimp shooting form of that cat on the 76ers to the injury habit of Zion Williamson, “the next Lebron James” has been an allusive business at best. There have been several players that I don’t remember hearing that much hype around who have actually become amazing.
The Joker of course, but players like Jaylen Williams and Tyrese Haliburton come to mind too, highly touted, kinda like Tyrese Maxey and Austin Reaves , but far from “sure things.” There were no magazine spreads with those players on the cover. No podcast hype. No pre-sold jerseys before they got to the league.
But what stuck out about Henderson’s coverage was something I’ve come to observe in the NBA over the years. A sort of fawning over a young player’s physical appearance, his body, his strength, his manhood.
Now obviously the business of picking the next Lebron James is filled with multiple layers: comprised of: The direction the league is going, raw talent, and each scout’s personal biases, to call out just a few, but it’s the concentration on physical gifts that I want to focus on here, and how our collective desire self-selects for a certain kind of player that isn’t, say, a shlubby white guy.
Luka Doncic, perhaps a bit in this mold, and by far one of the best players in the league, was a basketball prodigy on every level before getting to the NBA, and for all his gifts got a relatively muted media invitation by the powers at be, when he got to the league, in spite of how prodigious he was. Scouts and pundits knew he was phenomenal, but the luster and the fawning just wasn’t there for him in the same way as it was for someone like Zion Williamson four or five years ago, or for Scoot Henderson in this year’s rookie class.
At the end of the day, we’re all slaves to our perception. Ego plays a role in the stories we tell ourselves in our daily lives just as a scout’s own sublimated ego plays into a decision that ultimately has potential to change the course of one player’s life over another’s, and the league as a whole.
I have heard very well known basketball podcasters and journalists speak about bodies in ways that have made me squirm, and so I can only imagine how it might make those young men feel.
Gloating. Or perhaps the word is fawning, a fawning that comes from a place of authentic wonder for the physical gifts on display, yet not without a certain misplaced envy as well, framed by a history of power in sports, and the country at large.
To call it unethical, this envy, would be incorrect, it’s not that. There is genuine love, and appreciation for players by the scouts deciding their fates, buh-buh-but behind the fawning is a kind of inversion happening as well.
These are young men being gloated upon by “curators” and “tastemakers” exclusively because they have a chance to become world famous, ultra-rich household names.
Take Wembanyama. We have an entire industry celebrating his height and the skillfulness for a player of that size. In downright shock over his physical appearance. I mean, there’s nothing technically wrong with that, I mean physically he really is an amazing looking human who possesses length and skills at that size of 7’ 5’’ that has simply never been seen before. It’s the Elephant Man thing all over again, the “tallest building in the world,” except in Wembanyama’s case, we’ve sort of collectively given ourselves permission to do it because he is a world wide phenom who will undoubtedly make a quadrillion dollars by the time he is 30, so we gloat with the safety of knowing there is no risk.
That makes it kinda okay.
We’re safe.
But what if it’s for other players, whose future, unlike Wembanyama’s, is not cemented in the golden gates of heaven?
Players like Scoot Henderson, the vast majority of players.
When we start to gloat about their physical gifts when they’re just coming into the league as twenty-one year olds, or eighteen year olds, it can feel hollow, and uncomfortable, not because those physical attributes don’t exist, but because they exist within a narrow frame of interest — the market — and become relevant only if they succeed as players.
What happens if they don’t?
They’re forgotten and their gifts are no longer seen through any prism at all.
They’re just bodies. Thrown back into the meat grinder with the rest of us.
The same journalist or basketball curator or scout has lost interest, moved on to the next “sure thing,” and so have we.
The fan.
It’s natural not to care about athletes or musicians or authors who don’t make it in our world.
We’re conditioned to only give a shit about the success stories.
We’re taught to learn lessons from the people who “made it,” not the people who failed, and if we are learning lessons from failure it’s when we already know that the story had a happy ending; often forgetting how deep of a role luck plays in any one of our successes, human, or basketball alike.
Given that, it’s hard to listen to a journalist gush about a body, in particular when it’s a white media person gushing about a black body, which is often how it goes.
And it’s especially cold when you can feel how disinterested those same experts would be if the context shifted. If the lights suddenly weren’t as bright as they are on the NBA stage, and the player was no longer an up and coming star but just a dude who no longer had a shot.
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