Freddy Adu, Soccer Moms, and Larry Johnson Pt.1

What tells us more about the state of American sports than the saga of Freddy Adu? Or rather, the differences between sports. Namely, between basketball and soccer. Soccer, or Futbol, is becoming more accepted by Americans, contemporaneous with the team solidifying themselves as a world power. Basketball is spreading, breakneck speed around the world, while here, in it’s founding land, a growing group perceive it as a wooden ship heading to the shoals in a storm, the floundering rocks visible under the fountains of cacophonous spray.

This poor writer had a pause at that word: cacophonous. For that is exactly the charge leveled at the sport of basketball by those who are predicting it’s demise, if not charting it. Painfully so in most cases, for the beauty of basketball, the balletic soaring, the grandeur of explosion, the swiftness and speed of the game seen in its changes of direction, of tempo, of momentum, those runs of pure confidence of insuperable swagger punctuated by the haughty shot from beyond the arc, a dagger announced by the ripple of the net – these beauties are the lure for those lovers of the game. In sadness they trumpet it’s impending doom.

How can this be? Has there ever been a greater time in basketball? The skills that named Magic, the utter ball control anticipation vision, and a winner, the Bird, McHale, Parrish triumvirate, the Jordenesqueing of the Bulls, as the leader demi-god makes all around him his equal? What have they over Duncan, Shaq, Stojakovic, Kidd, McGrady, Kobe, Nowitski, Iverson – Carmelo, LeBron, Dwayne when and where shall that list end? At what can we make of our new seasons- the jockeying back and forth, the wild playoff prelude that involves the entire league, a memento of the razor’s edge between fifty wins and 42 and 32? The sovereignty of the home court?

Yet a journey to the future, to the park outside my door where I plied the courts until at last the middle aged body refuses to elevate anymore, or rather, land in one piece, is a glum path. Basketball is no longer fun. The battle of competition is fresh, fierce, young – but remove the skills attendant and you have nothing more than the battle, the game, the mastery has been removed. It’s replacement, the thrill of the posterization, of the cross-over, the drive, the bounce off the backboard, the bounce through the legs, the you can’t stop me attitude have become elements in their own sake. Removed from the game. Some are even endlessly practiced – the dunk, for the enterprising short the dribble moves, others not. Today they are the essential elements of the game.

A trip to the past. When the game appeared to be less athletically demanding, less physical, when space was obtained and defended by stint of being there as opposed to today’s all out position wars, a reliance was made upon passing, ball motion, synchronized off the ball movement, and that greatest of lost arts, shooting. How can it be that the game has evolved to more talent and athleticism, that the drama and narrative between teams has never been higher, yet the game itself has devolved to merit it’s harbinger of doom? A simple peek at Freddy Adu will highlight the what’s and wherefores of this dilemma. But I am ahead of myself.