Acquired Tastes: Charley Rosen

That basketball curmudgeon, Charley Rosen, is at it again. For those who haven't been monitoring the progress of Team USA (a designation which feels sort of odd, as this collection of superstars is only a team in the most literal sense of the word) at the world championships in Japan, good old Charley, perhaps the most virulently intelligent basketball critic on the Web, has been covering Team USA's games. Now, as I've mentioned in this blog before (just scroll down to "A Man for all Preseasons"), I have no quarrel with Rosen's normally insightful basketball analysis. He is knowledgeable and articulate the way few basketball writers are nowadays. He has a profound respect for the virtues of hard work, and the unsung hardcourt heroes who helped shaped basketball history. The problem with Rosen is that he conducts his analysis with an infuriating mix of intelligence, condescension and what I suspect to be an almost deliberate desire to be unfunny. People normally don't take kindly to "know-it-alls", no matter how many times he or she is right on the money. But it's even harder to swallow smug (and, annoyingly) accurate prognoses when it's delivered with such willful disregard for a cherished childhood admonition, by way of Mary Poppins: a spoonful of sugar should be reserved for more than just medicine, regardless of the direction the medicine chooses to travel. Still, he makes a lot of good points, so you might want to check him out.