Memo 10: Basketballship
In all honesty, I’ve kept up with the NBA finals the most adamantly this week.¹ And before I get called out by someone, I will give credit where credit is due — a big part of this came from Rohun’s incessant, unyielding, consistent obsession wearing off on me after months and years. But I’m no faker; I have grown to genuinely appreciate how much skill, energy, reflexive talent, physical endurance and charisma it takes to deliver an engaging game.
Whenever I think about basketball, I think about Paul Pffiefer’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse photo series. I saw it at the Broad a couple years ago and it has stuck with me ever since.
The photos are of basketball players during games, and solely that — Pffiefer edits out all brand names, logos and ads from the images, as well as extra players. A simple edit, it drastically changes the image because it lays bare what basketball really is: bodies pushed to the limit of their ability in repeating but unique ways as people watch on.
The name of the series ties into this as well:
“[Pffifer] states he sometimes names his artworks after famous or well known major religious events. He believes these events would be viewed just like the audience intently watches the basketball players in each of the photos… Pfeiffer uses the godlike appearance of athletes and iconographic images to imply a sense of awe and worship. Therefore, this can be another means of isolating greatness to create a reverence or focal point of his pieces. The use of light in his photos creates a sense of holiness by having the athletes appear as if they glow.”
The reverence and awe that fans have for basketball players are present in every moment, without a doubt. And true fans often see past the ads anyway to enjoy the purely physical rush of the game. But, at least for me when I started getting into basketball, the ads were so overwhelmingly present in how the game was designed on the court and in the live stream.
It’s no secret that the recording of sports games on television has changed how sports are structured, perceived and played. The changes range from the rules being massaged so that it suits television better, and games being played later times on the East Coast to suffice the West Coast’s desire for live games as well. Basketball is a bit more obvious in how television has infiltrated the game, as it has done so through ads in every possible timeout, break, free throw (“YouTube’s Try It Free Throws”), court design and sponsorship. It’s inescapable.
Now we are in a situation where the opposite of Pffiefer’s photographs are manifested: instead of adless spectator energy, the games in the bubble are hyper-capitalized people-less games. A fun tangent to this: since spectators observing the game has documented effects on the athlete performance — as athletes feel like spectators help them play better, supportive or hostile crowd alike — no quiet court games would do for the NBA bubble. As a result, the NBA spent a decent chunk of time making a complex and thorough 360-degree soundscape noise mix for the virtual crowd. The setup includes more than 700 individual sound clips from recorded games and 2k handled by eight “sound sweeteners” with nine game directors (who all had to, unsurprisingly, practice for hours beforehand on previous NBA games to get the timing and the specific audio chants right for each team).
What is spectatorship when it is bet on, bought out and monetized by companies as the spectators themselves are physically away from the game? The dialogue between spectators and advertisers becomes so loud sometimes that the pure talent of the bodies on the floor gets overshadowed. But, at the same time, ads are a small price to pay for a solid game that feels cinematic and holy. I know what I’ll be doing tonight.
And because there is always more to consume, here are some LINKS from this past week:
‘My Octopus Teacher’ on Netflix Is the Love Story We Need. One of the only other things I have watched this past week, it quickly ascended from being a pretty cool doc to a beautiful doc to one of my favorite docs of all time.
A Literal Child and His Mom Sue Nintendo Over ‘Joy-Con Drift’. Now this is an appropriate critic of a child!
How an American Girl Mallrat Reimagines Gaming’s Past. You may wonder, how much could someone write on the latest American Girl doll set from the 80s? A lot. There’s a lot here.
Rebels, Please Join Me in Wishing Emperor Palpatine Well. Maybe I have an opinion on the “no death wishes, no matter how bad the person is” stance… maybe I think one side is silly in their justifications… that’s one secret I’ll never tell. xoxo.
Yes, I have kept up with literally everything else this week more or less, but it is a little easier to keep up with a schedule of games than the 24-hour news cycle which may or may not be an accurate reflection of what’s going on, you can give me that.