What's With Intellectuals and the NBA?
Tyler Cowen likes to blog about the NBA, Matthew Yglesias is obsessed with it, and now Malcolm Gladwell is going on about it. Who are these people? I don't know one person who gives a defecation (I'm trying to maintain the intellectual theme) about anything that goes on in the NBA except when a bunch of players jump into the stands to beat up drunk fans. In the Gladwell discussion he and the ESPN commentator discuss how a lot of stars seem to phone it in after they sign a huge contract. Ya think? The whole league is a joke - no one can take seriously a league where a large percentage of the players are indifferent towards winning on any given night - and that's the playoffs - the regular season you can just completely forget. So what is the appeal of this charade to the intellectual class? Is it because their feelings of athletic inferiority find some consolation in thinking that it's only their failure to be 6'7" that kept them from being great basketball players themselves? Does the heavy African-American dominance give the sport a kind of cachet sort of in the way that Howard Cosell and Dick Schaap were mesmerized by the young Cassius Clay? Or are they just so dorky they can't tell a real sport from a fraud?