Sports writing wages a constant war against comments like this by Tim Duncan, in the postgame interview last night:
Each series is different. … All we can control is Game 4. We need to play better. Talk about whatever you want. They beat us. We’re going to play another game, and we’ll be ready for that one. However you want to twist it or turn it or give credit to whoever, they beat us. We’re moving on.
Duncan was responding to comments about whether the team was thinking about the OKC-Spurs series of 2012, in which OKC came back to win a series that at first seemed a Spurs blowout.
Dan McCarney had this to say in his thorough recap of the game at SpursNation:
You can guarantee there will be plenty cranked out — including on this web site — in the coming days about the potential for a repeat of the Spurs’ collapse against Oklahoma City in the 2012 Western Conference Finals, in which they blew a 2-0 lead with four straight losses. … But while they’ve acknowledged that it’s in the back of their minds in the days leading up to Game 3, Tim Duncan didn’t want to hear it...
“We can’t think like that,” he quoted Duncan as saying.
Athletes want to stay in the present, or at most acknowledge the future; narrative is often about making sense of what is happening as it turns towards the past, what the significance of a moment is in context. Sportswriting perhaps more than any form of writing has to deal with this problem as soon as it begins to deal with the humans who are involved in sport: its subject is not only the moment itself but the state of mind that wants never in a way to leave it, never quite to make sense of it, but to continue on in performance. Its subject is strangely the history of the athlete’s active forgetting.
The best sportswriters find some way to deal with this problem: gestures towards statistics and analysis help—like Michael Pina’s excellent look at what happened when Miami went small in Game 3 versus the Pacers--as well as the mere gesture of historical parallels which are invoked not to produce context but to create excitement, as McCarney does. The result is something that doesn’t quite choose one side or the other, history or the present. That itself remains open to the present and to this way of dealing with significant. And this is one of the things that might lend it its particular charm.
It’s a fatiguing process, but an exciting one, and in many ways is athletic in itself. Luckily though, there are owners for when you get tired. Because they seem just to hand you stories.
This is what is happening over in Memphis. Chris Mannix this morning posted a absolutely must-read article on the various shenanigans of the owner, Robert Pera, which helps to explain wholly the confusing situation involving Dave Joerger, their coach. Apparently Pera wanted to challenge Tony Allen and others to a game of one on one basketball.
After Joerger didn’t enjoy this, he wanted to fire him. But then he kept meddling, meeting with players, making strange suggestions. He proposed to Mike Miller that he replace Joerger as a player-coach. I would have paid money to see how the kind, gracious Miller tried to politely refuse.
Matt Moore has a wonderful summary of it, and what Pera’s response to the article this morning has been. Things continue to unfold right now—apparently Pera has just unfollowed Mannix on Twitter, which is kind of funny—but it seems like Pera is in danger of continuing to look unprofessional as it continues.
And so we get reminded that sometimes narratives are unavoidable, just as every once and a while a team gets reminded that it is just a whimsical episode in the life of a wealthy owner.
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