Special emergency edition of The Side Part, because we all had a lot to say after Russell Westbrook’s injury. This column typical runs on Thursday’s and it authored by Tyler Parker of Ballerball. You can follow him on Twitter here.
Down I go into the blackness, deep into the abyss. The dark places people who work at Hot Topic and sit front row at Gwar concerts are afraid to venture to.
This is where your emotions send you when the right meniscus of Russell Westbrook is torn. This is where you go when your sports heart takes a swan dive off the Cliffs of Insanity and you land in a pile of swords made by Inigo Montoya’s father. This is actually inconceivable. Russell Westbrook, the once unbreakable, is hurt.
My beard grows long and patchy and I squint because the sun is new to me. I’m in a robe and Seinfeld boxers, shuffling around in my house shoes with a carton of milk in my hand, muttering the word “wolverine” over and over, and I can’t remember what my name is.
I feel like someone wearing baseball spikes is treating my testicles like they’re trampolines and I’m having to watch the last few minutes of Blue Valentine while somebody plays Taps. Desperate times call for awful images.
* * *
Well, that was over dramatic. The world still spins and the sun came up and Kevin Durant is still too real. So it’s not as if we should all scramble to the lifeboats and steal lost, crying children and call them our own just so we can be saved after being complete and utter dicks to Kate Winslett. You messed up, Billy Zane. You didn’t know what you had. She was amazing, and you treated her like garbage. Now you lost her and all of a sudden you want her back.
There’s probably a stupid parallel there somewhere.
* * *
I’m not going to go into the whole was it dirty or wasn’t it argument too much because, frankly, the “it was dirty side” of things holds no water. That ship sinks.
It was stupid, for sure, because so many players try it and it never works, but it wasn’t dirty. Beverley was playing hard and made a play on the ball. No crime there. It was reckless, yes, but if you don’t play up till and semi-through the whistle in the playoffs, then you probably don’t deserve a whole lot of burn to begin with.
Now, that doesn’t mean he won’t get booed incessantly the next time he’s in The Peake. It’ll sound like every stealth bomber at Tinker is flying overhead, shaking the foul poles at Bricktown Ballpark.
But it wasn’t dirty.
Let’s just all agree to make fun of the misplaced Nelly bandaid above his eye and shout “Beverley!” over and over the way Will Ferrell did in that old SNL sketch.
* * *
If he needs crutches, he should get red ones. If he doesn’t need crutches he should still get red ones and use them anyway because think about it.
* * *
We’re at that weird place. The foreign one. The one we’re aliens to. The one we don’t know, because it’s never made itself known to us. The one where Russell Westbrook isn’t able to play. There is no precedence for this. If you’d have asked me if he was human prior to yesterday around noon then I’d have slapped you and told you absolutely not and how dare you even say such a thing. He always seemed to be made with the same stuff NASA used to make the Mars Rover. Just unable to break. Now, we see, he’s not.
It’s like when you first learn Santa’s not real.
You have this truth, then somebody sweet chin musics some reality your way and you’re left woozy, on the ground, trying to figure out where to go from here.
And now Kevin Durant is cornered. His back is pushed squarely against the wall and the dogs of the league bark and lunge for him and they see that he’s bleeding and all they want to do is get at his throat. They want to end it. He’s flexing, though, ready. Let’s see how hard he can swing.