Suffocating

A team of world class athletes, one that is heavily favored to defeat its opponents, enters a championship tourney. They ride a wave of national media attention and the emergence of their controversial star to overcome hostile crowds and earn a shot at a championship. They proceed to lose, despite being heavily favored, in heartbreaking, confusing fashion, with their aforementioned star falling apart before our very eyes. In the aftermath, they become heroes and an example of the value in overcoming adversity, earning dignity in defeat, and their star became a face of the game worthy of admiration.

Or maybe, in the aftermath of the same story, they’re chokers whose failure somehow made us all more successful, who got what they had coming to them, and whose star became a punching bag for a media with an axe to grind. It really depends whether we’re talking about the US Women’s World Cup Team or the Miami Heat.


The truth about the label “choker” is that its application tells us more about who we are than to whom it is applied. After all, sports almanacs are littered with names like Manning, Rodriguez, and Mickelson, all of whom carried the label around until they proved they could, in fact, reach the heights of their respective sports. The label was, in fact, false, even as it was relentlessly etched into history by fans and the media. What we were left with, as with all witch hunts, was a picture of the people who worked so hard to see the truth obscured.

Of course, this could certainly mean that the label just doesn’t work at all if it’s so subjective in its application. Perhaps that’s the real issue here; when an athlete “chokes” it is meant to indicate some personal failing beyond the professional loss. This, of course, neglects to acknowledge that one cannot “choke” without reaching a level of competitive success that only a rare sliver of humanity, sometimes only one other person, has reached. But rather than appreciate a talented competitor at the most elite level of competition, or even a worthy foe if we dislike the person behind the professional, we craft a thru-way from the personal to the professional in our target, one whose traffic flows out of ourselves. In smashing statistical legacies and forcing one failure to bleed into the rest of an individual athlete's life, we unload our own subjective anger onto the back of that athlete's being. Their failure being a symptom of "choking" allows us to engage in total loathing of the professional and person by uniting the two with the bridge of the "choke", letting our personal dislike run between the two entities unchecked by mathematical reality.

This is, of course, incredibly disingenuous. None of us would like to have anybody catch us on a day when we were off of our game and extrapolate that moment into not only our careers, but our lives as well. If that same moment were used as damning evidence not only of our performance, but our souls, I doubt most of us would venture to accomplish anything that required any real risk. Still, our collective dislike somehow empowers us to put that bile on people who lose at what are glorified games, as much as they may be fairly or unfairly loaded with metaphoric meaning. Furthermore even that dislike is fueled by the subjectivity of a moment, a preference, or a single decision. Hope Solo publicly shames her teammate, then goes on to have an equally abysmal performance in an equally critical moment, and we wrap her in the flag to protect her from the realities of what she did in the distant and recent past. Lebron James puts on a bad hour of television and he is questioned not only as a player but also as a man. We make two bad decisions and hundreds more and nobody talks about them because they are, in the grand scheme of things, often not indicative of the whole of our lives. That’s the point, I suppose. The “choker” exists only in a world where mere moments can speak for entire careers or lives, and that’s a world that we aren’t comfortable living in, but are more than happy to build for our athletes.

Re(visit)Generations

Last week’s NBA draft has me thinking about the idea of lost generations. With regard to draft classes, the concept is one brought up only in reference to heights of greatness or valleys of mediocrity and failure. In the aftermath of a draft that has been almost universally denounced as void of true star talent (the fact that “Mo Williams” was a potential comparison for number one pick Kyrie Irving speaks volumes) , one has to wonder about the ethics of labeling totally unproven commodities as failures, and what effect being part of this sort of lost generation has on the individuals contained. It is worth revisiting the 2009 draft, which was widely (and, at this point, certainly wrongly) heralded as a dead draft after Blake Griffin. Out of that emerged a group of talents like James Harden, Brandon Jennings, Stephen Curry, and Tyreke Evans, all of whom, though admittedly flawed, display flashes of the potential for greatness. In other words, that “lost generation” was pretty much like every other NBA draft, perhaps because of the proclamation that they were, in fact, lost to begin with.

By contrast, the 2010 draft class, built on marquee college talents such as John Wall and Evan Turner, looks every bit the wasteland that 2009 was promised to be. Outside of Wall and, if you’re feeling very generous, DeMarcus Cousins and Greg Monroe, the 2010 lottery is an albatross around its participants’ neck. Evan Turner and Derrick Favors look positively lost on a basketball court. Gordon Hayward is two throwaway games from being a forgotten man. Those are the highlights of the 2010 draft (again, after the splendid Wall and the inspired but infuriating Cousins, whose turnovers and shot selection would make players at your local Y blush). Yet there was certainly star power being touted by every media outlet in 2010 around this time, certainly in contrast to the open mockery reserved for the 2009 class (which, again, included the 2010-2011 rookie of the year, Blake Griffin). Tyreke Evans and James Harden are still talked about as if they are question marks instead of proven scorers (though Harden redeemed himself after the departure of Jeff Green), and yet wouldn't any team rather have either one of them instead of the bottom 12 of the 2010 lottery?

Furthermore, can we neatly separate these players from their generation? The most frequent critiques of Evans are his predilection to shoot first and his lack of involvement with his teammates on the court. Aren't these exactly the qualities we would expect, and even desire from a player that everyone had given up on before his career began by virtue of his "lost generation", the ultimate "nobody believes in me but me" story? Contrast this with Derrick Favors or Evan Turner, two players who were the embodiment of "putting the team first" or at least lifting their teammates up to their level in college, and both of whom found themselves completely lost in a league that expected them to live up to the potential of their generation, as if success in college, and not actual physical or skill-based attributes, were the harbinger of success in the NBA (Adam Morrison says hi, everybody who believes the opposite). Yet we still talk about Favors and Turner, who displayed none of Evans's or Harden's or Curry's rookie season potential, as though they can be redeemed (if I hear about Favors's "NBA body" one more time...Kevin Durant couldn't bench press 185 pounds ONCE, case closed). Evans and Harden, on the other hand, have their flashes of brilliance tossed aside as if they were empty calories (Curry, the most "empty calorie" of the three, escapes due to his college success, reinforcing the problem with the way we use both generational and individual college success in predicting and assessing NBA performance).

I suppose I'm touchy about this because I'm living in an economy that tells me that I'M the new lost generation, and that if the 2009 or 2011 draft classes, all of whom are likely better at their jobs now than I will be at my own for at least a decade, have no hope, then things must be really bad for the rest of us. That's the problem with generations, though. They make interesting conversation pieces and utterly useless measures of the individual. For all we know, Tristan Thompson could be the next DeMarcus Cousins, and he'll never be given the same benefit of the doubt Cousins received throughout his turnover riddled rookie year. Brandon Knight is almost certainly capable of putting up numbers similar to John Wall on a team like Detroit, but I can't help but feel like we'll view him as a disappointment regardless of the results, because we've already labeled his generation a disappointment, and there's simply no escaping that cling without superhuman performance; good work simply won't do. Isn't that unfair? Would any of us want to be judged that way, or are we already judged that way and simply in denial about the way the world works? I like the 2011 draft class more because they're such a hopeless lot, not in an antihero way, but in a way that I think makes them sympathetic to just about anybody born in the last 30 years. If they fail, it will have been inevitable, and if they succeed in any reasonable way it will never be appreciated; either way they'll be misunderstood by the old guard and their institutions. What could possibly be more understandable to my generation than that?