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A Gilbert Arenas primer
No matter how much basketball you watch or how much basketball you hate or how much basketball you don’t care about, chances are you’ve noticed the names LeBron and Kobe being thrown around in casual conversation, or overheard them sneaking out of CNN broadcasts in the airport. Perhaps this is as it should be – LeBron James and Kobe Bryant are likely the two most complete, athletically impressive and talented basketball players living in the world today. Still, if the actual game of basketball isn’t your cup of tea, who cares? LeBron’s turn on SNL was unconvincing at best, his friendship with Jay-Z seems unfounded and marred at least a little by a generational gap (LeBron is 23, Jay is 38), and off the court his demeanor is more like that of diplomat than a pop culture icon. Kobe picks up some slack in the personality department – the rape case, the public feuds with team mates, and his general outspoken nature help you put together a more complete profile of who Kobe is than LeBron’s steel reinforced media savvy wall will allow you to – but in terms of pop icon, there still isn’t too much to go on. So, for those of us who don’t actually sit down and study tape, where’s the real face of the NBA?
I present to you Gilbert Arenas.
Depending on how you look at him, Arenas is an idiot savant, an example of the value of hard work and perseverance, a incomprehensible loudmouth, or an overrated player who will never be a true point guard. The guy who inexplicably tries to bounce the ball off the floor to make a shot, they guy with the bad knee, the perpetual loner, a mystery. But in any case, he is a public figure extraordinaire, and a classic sports eccentric.
Sports are a comfortable home for eccentric personalities; the hands-off attitude with which coaches, managers and league officials (if increasingly not the media) exercise in regards to the off the field actions of players allows professional athletes to maintain a level of separation between work life and private life that is rarely seen in other professions as publicly visible and prone to stardom. Where the private lives of actors, comedians, and musicians must either support or hinder their professional careers, a job as a professional athlete, much like an office job which allows workers to be straight laced from nine-to-five and turn in to total freaks at night, leaves much more room for the “I got my work done, didn’t I?” excuse for personal eccentricities. Look at Arenas in the same way you’d look at Bill Walton (a seven foot tall white goof with a hopeless stutter), Mark Fidrych (a pitcher who talked to balls and insisted on manicuring the mound himself), or Clinton Portis (an NFL running back who routinely attends press conferences as one of many self created characters) – namely someone who never would have had a ghost of a chance at celebrity outside the world of sports.
While there are many ways to prove Arenas’s claim to the title of the NBA’s greatest public figure in 2008, let’s focus on the written word. Arenas, like many professional athletes these days, writes his own blog. Most if not pretty much all of these blogs are worthless, largely meaningless attempts to “connect” with the fans – to give fans a dose of “what it’s like to be a professional athlete”. They often recount anecdotes from the locker room, funny stories about teammates, or give updates on their health and general feeling of the team over the course of a season. Readers comment, creating a dialogue about very little. If the very nature of this idea isn’t flawed, which I think it very well might be, it at least fails in execution since, even if athletes have something interesting to say, they often don’t know how to say it.
Arenas’s blog largely throws this formula out the window. He still talks about sports, his health, his teammates, but he is able to do so in a way that allows the reader to forget that Arenas is actually a pretty famous professional basketball player. He mentions trainers, doctors, assistant coaches, as much as he mentions Puff Daddy (who apparently showed up for Gilbert’s birthday party last year). He treats the blog as carelessly as anyone should treat a personal blog, at one time ruffling feathers by posting a routine written by comedian Ian Edwards without citation, but also recognizes the power it has in cementing his image. His style is conversational, and the the immediate, onomatopoetic quality of the writing, as well as his strangely innate sense for dialogue (or maybe I’m just a sucker for “he was like”, “she was like” constructions) come of at times as actually pretty good writing.
But as much as you read his blog, it’s difficult to understand Arenas fully without both approaching him as a public figure and watching him play. With the Washington Wizards beginning their first round NBA playoff series with the Cleveland Cavaliers tomorrow night, there will be plenty of time to get acquainted with his game, but this may be your last chance to familiarize yourself with the nuances Arenas’s lexicon, his semiotics, and his game before he eclipses the Pope as print fodder number one. Go Wizards.
Suggested further reading materials below.
- A nice summary of Arenas’s eccentricities from the excellent Gilbertology blog.
- Gilbert’s blog. Very well written.
- Wizznutzz – your resource for everything Washington Wizards. Very well written.