Cavs win in game refereed by Captain Crunch

—and other existential notes exploring the black man’s authoritative role in basketball’s form and the white man's taxin'



Lebron did nothing. The Cavs blew their lead. They mis-communicated and under-performed. On the last play of regulation in Monday’s 76er contest, after a true basketball shot was made 76er Michael James, Lebron drove poorly and was blocked. Devon Brown was then bumped in a mutation of a play that didn’t matter. Everyone walks off the court. Then they walk back on to see Devon hit two free throws. What? Phili should’ve won, didn’t. Fuck it. Watch ESPN or something.

Devon Brown said after the win: “I couldn’t see anything or focus on anything. Emotional.”

“I just wanted to get it up in the air. And they went in. Hey?”

Cavs announcer Antoine Carr said he had “ice water in his veins.” More like gummy bears.

Why Ohio teams love to win seemingly finished games via technicality is beyond my comprehension. And that sucks because winning by the whistle is cheap.

The other homer Cavs announcer Fred Mcleod said Samuel Dalembert had “the look of a man who committed a sin.” Tears hadn’t formed but his face did have the upturned salad look of imminent sadness. That and Sam raised his hand, but in the deafening confusion limply let it fall as no one knew what was happening.

“Sin”, eh? The foul is the sin. Basketball is the thing. The rules are the boundaries of the thing. Basketball’s rules could change anytime and we’d still have basketball. God is life, society its boundaries. We could change society anytime and still have life.

We could easily change it.

But we don’t. Society changes stupidly and with hiccups and riders good ol’boy networks. I’d like to stake claim on the overall kindness in the white man’s culture, but he certainly has a lot of pedantic rules that seem to kill the essence of an activity’s intent, like enjoying life or understanding that in the matter-of-factness of basketball the hand is part of the ball and sometimes players just run into each other and that's ok.

Which leads me to this question.

If the black man had invented basketball, would there be fouls? If that is incorrect and someone shows me that the sport was in fact invented by the black man, fine. Whatever. Then the question remains, if the black man had control of the game, would there be fouls? Or at the least, would the foul structure and referee regulation change. For the better? For the worse?

Presumably if Obama wins the election, some change will come in this country's societal structure. It seems obvious that if any black person had some true power, he would change the prison hierarchy straight away. So many men and women get wrung by our system, mostly because of drugs, poverty and mis-education. These are all fouls, but should they mean you can't play? People who like three-strikes laws — white men in power — say yes.

Talk about the phantom foul call of all sins: drugs. It makes sense drug addicts be dealt with medically and not criminally. It makes sense that two people running and jumping next to each other at top speed might touch. Yet each is dealt with criminally.

It doesn't make sense that so many shady-ass dudes (drug suppliers) have a lot of power in this country just because we don't want to part with some bogus anachronistic ideal of leftover puritan dreck. It doesn't make sense that refs have so much power. Yet each is left to his own devices?

The players play. They decide. Fouls are not basketball. Fouls are rules. They can be changed. The beauty of the game is free motion, not arbitration. The essence of basketball is the round ball, running, jumping, throwing, aiming, teamwork and individual creativity. We can change anything but that and still have basketball. Foul shots are more like croquet anyway.

Double bonus, team penalty, one-and-one— scrap it all.

Why should there foul outs? Jeff van Gundy is the only guy I’ve ever heard voice it, at least in a live broadcast, that it’s ridiculous players foul out.

Damn right.

Take a step out of basketball culture’s shoes and think about it terms of weighing all the action against all the consequence. It feels like a fly-by-night rule someone thought up just because there needed to be a rule. Like it was 1893 and the first ever rule book went to press at 8 a.m. the next day, but the scribe was busy boffing. That’s seriously how shit gets started in this culture. A screw up makes it to print and sits around for a hundred years, its perception gilding with time. To those in the greatest generation and the boomers, the older and more irrelevant something becomes, the wiser it is. A precedent it is.

Bullshit it is.

In the microwaveable Ramen cup generation, it's wack that some industrial revolution era opium fiend slept in and never correctly crafted a penalty structure, and now here we are in 2008 stuck with Devon Brown’s gummy worm cool winning a kangaroo court. I think Devon Brown is gay. (Devon, if you’re not, cool. I am not saying I have proof, I am just guessing you’re gay. If someone said about me they thought I was gay, I’d just be like, ‘Whatever, I know I’m not and my girlfriend is the smoke.’ So, if you’re not gay, I hope you just say that and move on. But if you are gay, I fuckin’ knew it.)


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P.S. Everything I feared about the Cavs trade is coming to fruition. Staph infection in Z’s brain coming next. Four doesn’t replace two and Delonte is the golden pear, a legend, a myth, a bygone tale of treasure and catastrophe.