Monday, September 04, 2006

Epic Poetry in Motion: Hellas beats Team USA



"I fear the Greeks, even when they bring gifts."



One could easily attribute Team USA's shocking 101-95 loss to an inspired Greek team to the decline of liberal education in the Western hemisphere. After all, even a casual student of Virgil (and by this I refer also to the average University of Asia and the Pacific student) would have known better than to underestimate a people known for both their resilience in the face of annihilation (Thermopylae and Marathon spring to mind) and their patient, passionate rationality even under the merciless heel of conquering foes (one could hardly deny the impact of Greek thought on Roman culture). Yet, instead of making overblown, pretentiously untenable remarks on the state of education and international basketball, let's just stick to basketball for the meantime. I'm sure that there is an audience for a paper on "The Follies of Forgetting: Anamnesis as an Integral Component to International Basketball", but that audience would probably consist of just myself and my geek (not Greek) friends.



First, here are some links to get you started. Charley Rosen, basketball curmudgeon extraordinaire, comes up with a list of reasons to account for Team USA's loss. Not surprisingly, Rosen comes up with eight eloquently worded reasons with a single recurring subtext: "I told you so." Still, he makes excellent observations regarding the state of professional basketball in the US:



"The most basic of the cultural factors that is destroying the beauty of basketball-as-we-should-know-it is America's obsession with numbers: The stock market and its fluctuations. The GNP and the unemployment rate. Ubiquitous rankings and poll results. Test scores. Gross and net worth. Ledger entries in red or black ink. What's your APR? Your IQ? Your credit rating? Who's Number One?


In virtually every aspect of our society, value is expressed in numerical terms. This makes us unwitting captives of a linear mode of thinking that doesn't truly honor the mystery of the human spirit — or the complexities of the games we play and watch.


No wonder that, in the wonderful world of the NBA, the players, the fans, and the media are infatuated with statistics. Points scored, shots taken, rebounds corralled, assists distributed, and so on. However, except for games played and minutes played (and sometimes Personal Fouls), these numbers are concerned only with what happens when a player is in the immediate proximity of the basketball.


That's why so many of us are mesmerized by the ball/spotlight.


That's why American hoopers have such brilliant ball skills and particularly excel in one-on-one and two-on-two situations.


That's why a team of smart, experienced, and cohesive players, who can't come close to matching our athleticism, beat us so consistently in top-flight international competition."



Henry Abbott at TrueHoop provides a useful repository of pre-screened links to insightful basketball analysis on Team USA's defeat in the blogging community. I'm almost embarrassed to mention this at this late stage in my blogging, but TrueHoop is one of my first stops on the Net. I've long been a fan of both Mr. Abbott's sincere and intelligent appreciation of the sport, and his hard work in putting a cohesive and enjoyable hoops blog for the educated basketball aficionado.



This belated, and well-deserved citation of Mr. Abbott's blog brings me to another Net pleasure, The Mighty MJD. Check out the entry entitled Break Out The Olive Oil. Though The Mighty MJD has a regrettable tendency to lapse into profanity every once in a while, he's funny, informative, honest and sneakily intelligent. His astute observations on sports and popular culture make him a pretty reliable Net stop after TrueHoop.



I wasn't able to watch Hellas beat Team USA as my wife and I are hurriedly making belated preparations for the arrival of our second son, Manuel, who's arriving a little too early for our OB GYN's tastes, but I must confess that it was surprisingly satisfying to find out that they did. Let's not try to read any sociopolitical subtext into this, mind you. I'm just speaking as a sports fan. The fact that I try, on a semi-regular basis, to express myself in more or less American English should attest to the fact that I really don't engage in any US inspired bashing. As a sometime athlete reared on movies such as The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and Hoosiers, it was a pleasure to hear of yet one more instance when the whole was worth more than the sum of its parts, that a talented bunch of individuals were able to find that elusive state of perfection where creative individual talents were harnessed into a coherent game plan. That's all.



Still, I can't help but wonder. What if Coach K and the members of Team USA were schooled in classical literature?

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