ESPN NBA

Many thanks to TrueHoop reader Mark, who has taken a crack at uniting two topics of the week -- the untimely passing of David Foster Wallace -- and various boneheaded things said and done by athletes, perhaps even including one Josh Howard.

From an Esquire article called The String Theory, originally published in 1996:

Americans revere athletic excellence, competitive success, and it's more than lip service we pay; we vote with our wallets. We'll pay large sums to watch a truly great athlete; we'll reward him with celebrity and adulation and will even go so far as to buy products and services he endorses.

But it's better for us not to know the kinds of sacrifices the professional-grade athlete has made to get so very good at one particular thing. Oh, we'll invoke lush clichés about the lonely heroism of Olympic athletes, the pain and analgesia of football, the early rising and hours of practice and restricted diets, the preflight celibacy, et cetera. But the actual facts of the sacrifices repel us when we see them: basketball geniuses who cannot read, sprinters who dope themselves, defensive tackles who shoot up with bovine hormones until they collapse or explode. We prefer not to consider closely the shockingly vapid and primitive comments uttered by athletes in postcontest interviews or to consider what impoverishments in one's mental life would allow people actually to think the way great athletes seem to think. Note the way "up close and personal" profiles of professional athletes strain so hard to find evidence of a rounded human life -- outside interests and activities, values beyond the sport. We ignore what's obvious, that most of this straining is farce. It's farce because the realities of top-level athletics today require an early and total commitment to one area of excellence. An ascetic focus37. A subsumption of almost all other features of human life to one chosen talent and pursuit. A consent to live in a world that, like a child's world, is very small.

(Footnote 37: Sex and substance issues notwithstanding, professional athletes are our culture's holy men: They give themselves over to a pursuit, endure great privation and pain to actualize themselves at it, and enjoy a relationship to 'excellence' and 'perfection' that we admire and reward (the monk's begging bowl, the RBI guru's eight-figure contract) and like to watch, even though we have no inclination to walk that road ourselves. In other words, they do it for us, sacrifice themselves for our redemption.)

I find this exceptionally insightful.

But there is one twist, I think, with NBA athletes particularly: They will tell you that they do have free time.

But it's weird time. It's in a fancy hotel in a strange city, between shootaround and tip-off.

Not since Bill Bradley have I heard of players just renting a car and heading off sightseeing (the Hoover Dam!).

What are you supposed to do then? 

No wonder there are a lot of soap opera, Judge Judy, and Oprah fans in the NBA. No wonder there are so many video game players. No wonder so many players stay up so late -- how could you not nap when that is the time and place of your free time?

I personally hate being alone, at a loose end, in a hotel. There is no better setup to make me just lose a bunch of time to television. I'd love to tell you I read a book then, but when you're tired after an early flight, that big screen is hard to ignore!

And it's the weirdest thing. You're doing what most of the world would most like to be doing, instead of working, vacuuming, or changing diapers. You're enjoying down time, watching TV, lying on sheets and pillows that someone else will wash.

But if you'd really rather be somewhere else, for instance with people you love, even that luxurious free time is a small kind of deprivation.