Ringmaster

The NBA lockout wasn’t exactly a diamond mine of writing opportunities. Nevertheless, Brian Phillips found a riveting way to put it all in context:

In the past 15 years or so, the NBA has been haunted by a specter, one that began to coalesce around the advent of Allen Iverson before fully emerging in the wake of the Palace brawl. The specter is, to put it simply, the Red State Fan. To put it a little less simply, the specter is “the guy who boasts about preferring college basketball to the NBA without examining the reasons why,” or “the suburban dad who wants to take his kids to a game but can’t because Stephen Jackson might go on a rampage and kill them.” There’s a very distinct form of punitive desire that tends to well up in sports fans who see young men living lavishly on their nickel, and it’s not always related to race. As the lockout showed, though, it’s practically impossible to separate race from the tangle of fan/player and player/management relations in the NBA. Stern, who is almost certainly not personally bothered by hip-hop, gave the Red State Fan what he wanted by handing down a lot of petty decrees that — whatever the intention — came off as an attempt to make the NBA more palatable to white fans.