Every sport has its own logic and unique appeal.
Football
Football is a game of narrative. With fewer possessions than nearly any other sport, football naturally tends towards rising tension as the game progresses (barring a complete blowout). Simultaneously, every single play is a legitimate scoring opportunity for both teams. Scoring plays are incredibly important and yet also always possible.
It is unsurprising that it is the most popular sport in America. The American believes that everything is possible, that the score could always be flipped in a single play.
Of course, most Americans have already been blown out of the game. This only fuels the popularity of football, a fantasy of a dream never realized. Even this fantasy is a winner-takes-all contest, more unequal than any other major sport, where certain franchises are relegated to lifetimes of suffering, never coming anywhere close to tasting success. The American mind cannot comprehend.
Football is also quintessentially American in that it is a war. Coaches are generals, and their orders are to be obeyed always and absolutely. They formulate complex strategies, in an esoteric language all their own, to outsmart and outmaneuver their opponents. They construct a roster of 53 players (twice that in college), a roster larger than that of any other sport. They deploy their troops in a small number of delineated battles, racking up casualties throughout the season that they must overcome.
While individual talent makes a difference, each player is usually only on the field for half the game, and on most plays most players don't even come close to touching the ball. Talent, too, is more directly linked to coaching than in games like baseball or basketball. While a coach might help a baseball or basketball player refine their pitch choice or shot selection, a football player lives or dies on his coaching. Countless promising prospects have moldered in bad organizations, while seemingly unremarkable players have been turned into GOATs by good coaching. Consequently, football players rarely demand trades like basketball players do, and have much more limited control over their fate or the role they play on their team.
All of this rigid order climaxes on field, only for chaos to reemerge——football is the only sport where the ball isn't round.
Basketball
Basketball is a game of characters. With only 5 players on each team on the court at a time, basketball is the most individualistic of all major team sports. A single player can take control of and transform a game, a season, a franchise.
At the same time, basketball is a game of constant intuitive activity. With few breaks and more scoring than any other sport, basketball players must act without thinking, in harmonious flow with the rhythm of the game. Compared to the subtle development of positioning in soccer, or the methodical battle of field position in football, every possession of basketball stands alone, a new day on which to make your legacy.[1] One play, <24 seconds, is all it takes to etch your name forever in NBA history. Hell, sometimes it doesn't even need to be in a game.
Basketball players are born, not made. Basketball depends on innate physical traits (namely, height) more than any other sport (with the exception of bodybuilding). Of course skill must be developed, but ceilings are established early. Because skill relies on unalterable physical traits and rapid, ingrained, subconscious decision-making, it is rare that basketball players radically raise their ceilings by the time they go pro.
For all these reasons, basketball is defined less by its teams, but by its players.[2] And those players are defined by swag––runners want to be them, baseball players want to be them, football players want to be them. There's no more "he's him" sport than basketball.
My 7 favorite basketball players of all time
1. Boban Marjonović
Boban is simply the most likeable player to ever play the game.
God kissed this Serbian homunculus and left a tumor on his pituitary gland, and so he treats every day he survives as a blessing. Famed for his friendships with Tobias Harris and Luka Dončić, fans and players alike fawn on him like a kindly buffalo who has wandered into human society and adopted its customs. And he seems to love it! Marveling at his size would quickly sour if he resented us for it, yet despite riding the bench for the entirety of his career, being traded from team to team, and being generally unknown outside of real ball knowers (pause), Boban is just a happy guy. His joie de vivre cannot be taught, but is an inspiration to take every opportunity we get––to act in John Wick 3, to produce techno, to recreate TikToks in the Balkan countryside with your children.
Being a basketball player is incidental to him. The punchline is that he is the most efficient NBA player to ever live.
2. Wilt Chamberlain
"Everybody pulls for David, nobody roots for Goliath."
Shut the fuck up about footage of the 100-point game. I'll kill you. You really think that didn't happen? What's the point? Why would they make that up? They forgot how to count? And what does it say about you that you can't believe? You probably squealed with glee as child telling your friends that Santa wasn't real. You want to pull us all into the muck with you.
There are few accomplishments, in any sport, that are so incredible as to be literally unbelievable. Incredulity is the ultimate respect.
Wilt Chamberlain holds 72 NBA Records. Click the link, read his Wikipedia page. I couldn't do it justice.
The obvious response is that he was playing against plumbers and used car salesmen. Again, who cares. You're only as great as your circumstances allow you to be, and Wilt conquered his circumstances. So complete was his triumph that it stretches even beyond the basketball court––he beat Olympic athletes at their own sports, became a professional volleyball player, famously slept with 20,000 women, and was still receiving offers to return to the NBA at 50 years old. Like Mynheer Peeperkorn, he was simply larger than life, and we, his gaggle of onlookers, can only stand in awe.
3. Dennis Rodman
Little can be said about Dennis Rodman that hasn't already been said. Swag that was decades ahead of its time.
4. Ant
5. Ron Artest
There may be no more tragic figure in sports than Ron Artest.
"The metaphysical joy in the tragic is a translation of the instinctive unconscious Dionysian wisdom into the language of images: the hero, the highest manifestation of the will, is negated for our pleasure, because he is only phenomenon, and because the eternal life of the will is not affected by his annihilation" - Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
RON ARTEST: A TRAGEDY
"Wrath, goddess, sing of Achilles Pēleus’s son’s / calamitous wrath, which hit the Achaians with countless ills"
ACT I
Western Conference Semifinals, 2009. A reporter asks Ron Artest about the intensity of the game, which ended for him in an ejection. Artest responds, "I remember one time, one of my friends, he was playing basketball and they were winning the game. It was so competitive, they broke a leg from a table and they threw it and it went right through his heart and he died right on the court. So I'm accustomed playing basketball really rough."
Trope NYC projects background story. The world is aggressive, it teaches Artest to be aggressive, basketball offers some escape from the world, but his aggression is key to his success, and he cannot escape his aggression.
Act I concludes with the 2004 Eastern Conference Finals. Artest is on the pinnacle of victory, but has yet to secure it.
ACT II
Artest is simply responding to his environment as best as he knows how. He controls himself until he can't. Unlikely circumstances outside of his control conspire to produce this result. With only 45 seconds left and a 15-point lead, the game is already over. This almost didn't happen.
Afterwards, Artest bears the full weight of the world. All of the passive racism and respectability politics of David Stern's NBA in the early 2000's finds its apogee in the league's response to Artest, disciplining him with the longest suspension for on-court behavior in NBA history. He becomes a pariah, known more for this fight than anything else. The hero is negated.
ACT III
June 17th, 2010. Game 7 of the NBA Finals. Artest is closer now to victory than he's ever been. Kobe Bryant, the clear leader of the team and eventual martyr of basketball, is having an awful night, shooting 6-for-24. Artest has already bailed Kobe out with a game-winning put-back buzzer beater off of Kobe's missed shot in a series-defining Game 5 in the Western Conference Finals. In the Finals, Artest has effectively neutralized Kevin Garnett on defense, but has been irrelevant offensively. With a minute to go and leading by only one score, the spotlight is still on Kobe——known for his penchant for big moments—–to secure the victory.
Yet it is Artest who makes the game-sealing shot, a dagger three, only the second he had made that night out of 7 attempts."This was Artest singing redemption’s song in the sweetest way, by playing hero on the biggest stage of his career, with a shot no one in the building would have predicted he’d take or make given his struggles from deep throughout the series."
"He passed me the ball––he never passes me the ball––and he passed me the ball! Kobe passed me the ball, and I shot a three!"
Coach Phil Jackson would say in his post-game interview that Artest was the MVP of the game, yet it is Kobe who wins the Finals MVP.
Artest is there five years later, riding the bench, for Kobe's last game. Kobe is Artest's foil––whereas Kobe's sins are absolved by the public, Artest's image is still solely defined by his wrath. But in Game 7 of the 2010 NBA Finals, his one championship, Ron Artest was the hero.
6. Giannis
He's just silly and I like that.
7. Jokić
>Man goes to doctor.
>Says he's depressed.
>Says life seems harsh and cruel.
>Says he feels all alone in a threatening world where what lies ahead is vague and uncertain.
>Doctor says, "Treatment is simple. Nikola Jokić, the best basketball player in the world, is in town tonight. Go and see him. That should pick you up."
>Man bursts into tears.
>"But doctor... I am Nikola Jokić."
Jokić is the quintessential miserable Slav. All he wants to do is race horses, and yet somehow he ended up as the greatest basketball player of his generation. His basketball IQ is so impressive even his competitors are in awe.
Jokić is the dialectical opposite of Bobi. Whether you hate or love your fate, you must rise to it. Both have mastered their moment, making the most of the cards they were dealt, indelibly writing their lives on the face of the earth. You are the only one who feels your feelings, and they do not define you or the role you play in the world——in a thousand years, no one will care how you felt. But they will remember three (should be five) MVP trophies.
AMOR FATI
Baseball
Baseball is a game of quirks. It's hard to keep something interesting for 4860 games. Viscerally, the most exciting play is a home run, but every home run looks the same. The real fun comes from more cerebral feats: pitching a perfect game––one of the rarest accomplishments in sports––or an immaculate inning, or hitting for the cycle, or unusually fast or slow pitches, or unusually old or young players, or any other statistical anomaly. The more one starts to dig into the game, the more achievements one finds, leading autists to nerd out about the slightest quirk of the numbers. There is no least interesting number, because such a number would be interesting for the very fact of its uninteresting-ness. Likewise, there is no least interesting baseball game, or player, or play, and the deeper one digs, the more quirks one can find to make it interesting.
Hockey
Hockey is a game of chaos. Of all major sports, hockey is the most dependent on random chance. The goals are tiny, the puck is tiny, and everyone is on fucking ice skates. It's insane.
Hockey highlights are rarely beautiful. You'll respond, "What about this one" and pull up a Youtube compilation of "Most JAW-DROPPING Hockey Trick Shots EVER!!!" The exception proves the rule. Usually, the puck gets passed around a little bit, they get it near the goal, and after hitting the side of someone's stick and someone else's skate and the inside of the goalie's leg, it's in the goal. (But you, the viewer, can really only catch these details on replay. In realtime, it's like a car crash.) Most of the time, there's nothing beautiful about it.
"I went to a fight and a hockey match broke out."
All of this chaos is too much for the human mind to bare, and it must exorcise it's unsublimated urges through violence.
“The more the drive toward life is thwarted, the stronger is the drive toward destruction." ― Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom
This is the best part of hockey, of course. Hockey is one of the only sports that remains honest about its scope. While the officials of all other sports seek to monopolize their sovereignty over their games, in hockey, the refs realize that even on ice, man is still subject to higher powers and more primordial rules. They let the players fight, and in doing so they are no longer players, they are simply and wholly men, nothing more and nothing less. After, they dole out the necessary slaps on the necessary wrists in order to maintain order, to maintain the system and the rules we've all agreed on, and after a few minutes of each player (they're players once again) sitting in timeout, we are back to where we started.
"I got a woman I love, she's crazy and paints like God
She's got a playground sense of justice, she won't take odds
I got a tattoo with her name right through my soul"- Guy Clark
Hockey follows the justice of children, which is truer than that of adults. What was once settled by a playground brawl, followed by timeouts, and which allowed the belligerents to continue being friends for the duration of their school days together––what was once child justice, becomes the impenetrable, unrelenting, and adult system of law. Like the officials of most sports, we apply our rules universally, with the same post-enlightenment certainty with which we regard scientific laws. We are arrogant, and we act like we can control the chaos of the world. Yet the chaos inevitable swells above the ramparts enclosing us, what is right escapes the clutches of our attempts to find justice through legislation, and before we know it we have committed genocide upon genocide while following the letter of the law to a T.
Rather than resist the chaos of the world, we must embrace it and give the tide room to ebb and flow. Our mistake (amongst many) is that we have spurned nearly every culture that has come before ours by abandoning dueling. The state's monopoly on violence is the abdication of our ultimate personal responsibility to settle our disputes, and irrespective how progressive or reactionary its brand of justice, true reconciliation is impossible––how can you reconcile anything when you, yourself, haven't done anything to enact that reconciliation? Like in hockey, we need the room to start hitting a man who has wronged us, to experience the adrenaline, the satisfaction, the pleasure, guilt, shame, and remorse of hurting him, to see ourselves in him, and to ultimately realize that we don't want to cause him any permanent harm. We raise our pistols, we shoot wide, and we grab a beer with him afterwards. Or we fire dead on, and we are more human than we've ever been, more human than any law could ever contain.
Soccer
Soccer is a game of simplicity. It is the most popular game in the world because so little is needed to play it––a ball and goals, both of which can be improvised with damn near anything. It transcends language, and broadcasts in other languages are often equally exciting. Leagues go nearly year-round, and soccer fans enjoy having favorite teams in many leagues, often with little personal connection. One can tune in to any soccer game at any point and basically immediately have a decent sense of what's going on––you probably didn't miss anything. Soccer is, famously, one of the lowest scoring games, and so much of the excitement comes from almost scoring. But if you got to the stadium late and missed a few shots on the goal, it's alright, the score remains 0-0, and you can jump right into it.
Because of its simplicity, soccer fans jump right into it like almost no other fans do. Most of the chaos of soccer occurs not on the pitch, but in the stands. Hooliganism is rooted in deep cultural, geographic, and class-based ties to teams. It is a Dionysian excess of passion spilling over the walls of a container that is simply too rudimentary to contain it. In an American football game, some of each side's passion gets sublimated or subsumed by the game itself. Seeing players run through each other like gladiators in the coliseum satiates some of the violent urges of the crowd. Soccer provides no such surfeit, and hooligans must exercise their own base instincts.
The Olympics
The Olympics are games of nationalism. National pride takes the form of the most primitive physical feats: the fastest, the strongest, the furthest, the most accurate. These objective measures are the basis some of the oldest competitions, and transcend culture and time. The liberal order, having proscribed warfare as a direct means of national competition, delineates discrete athletic events as the new battleground.
As an aside, it's popular to hate on the Olympics for fucking over their host countries. Fair, but the Olympics are still fun, and the idea that they shouldn't exist is stupid. You spend all your time railing against the unbridled optimization of neoliberalism, and then you get mad at the one time when we put a ridiculous amount of money towards something purely for our own superficial amusement? Could we have used the money spent to build a new stadium on affordable housing? Sure, but the world would be a worse place with no stadiums. Of course, there is a middle ground to be found here (more equitable distribution of the profits of the Olympics, or of sports as a whole), but it's often the same people saying "The world is cruel, we have to find ways of coping" who are most judgemental of the ways people choose to cope.
Skating, BMX, Skiing, Snowboarding, etc.
Skating and other "trick" sports are games of swag. Judges look not just for technical difficulty, but for style. Each of these sports has complex lingo impenetrable to the uninitiated because a buttery turtle slide hand drag off the knuckle sounds cool. All of these sports are ostentatiously cool, seen in the attention competitors pay to their own personal fashion.
This makes them intimidating. I have always felt intensely judged at a ski hill or skate park. These judgments go beyond simple ability, but are something more ontological––how cool are you?
But, of course, being cool means being different than everyone. The most exciting players are those that buck trends and do everything with their own style.
Gymnastics, Ice Skating, Climbing, Dance, etc.
Gymnastics and other "maneuver" sports are games of grace. Skating and BMX require grace as well, but sports like gymnastics have a more classical aesthetic of grace. Trick sports are meant to look hard, while maneuver sports are meant to look easy. Clean, precise movements, elegant landings. Simple actions done perfectly are rewarded more than difficult ones done poorly. It's the difference between teaching a dog to do tricks and seeing a cat's natural acrobatics. Both are impressive, but for different reasons.
Bodybuilding
Bodybuilding is a sport of honesty. It has grown in popularity with the internet because success is inimitable––either you have muscles or you don't. The bodybuilding stage reveals all, every rep and hGH cycle laid bare for the world. Scandals arise when people do try to fake it, but these are only scandals because the community puts such a high premium on honesty in the first place. Every bodybuilder peddles their own endorsed brand of snake oil, from creatine to protein powders to legally dubious nootropics, but when the competition arrives, there's no faking it.
Most bodybuilders' mistake is at stopping at their body. Rick Owens says that working out is modern couture, but once you've worked out a lot, it's worth returning to actual modern couture. Despite their obsession with aesthetics, most bodybuilders have terrible style. Normal clothes are not made for bodybuilders, and they look incredibly funny when they attempt to wear them. This is kinda fun, for sure, but I wanna see a bodybuilder decked out in full runway Rick or Ottolinger or Yohji or CDG.
Racing
Racing sports are mostly just about when you change your tires.