The picture I sent my fiancée wasn’t a very impressive one, but she was sympathetic, more than anyone can be owed. I had just pissed on an old blue shirt with a Superman’s “S” on the chest, threw it in the garbage, and sent her the photo. Or I set fire to it. Or the shirt just got a bunch of rotten kale dumped on top. I can’t quite remember.
This was my first ever dive into desecrating an object in effigy. Dwight Howard got me there. He left the Orlando Magic in 2012 after leading them on a spectacular eight-year run, unlike any other in the team’s history, a run that marked the first peak of a three-point revolution still transforming the NBA. Mike D’Antoni gets lots of credit for being the coach who ushered in this new brand of basketball, but he hasn’t reached an NBA Finals. Coach Stan Van Gundy and the Orlando Magic got there in 2009, led by a pair of home-grown All-Stars, Jameer Nelson and Dwight Howard.
Back to the shirt. It was 2013, and Howard was gone, having escaped Orlando for Los Angeles like fellow self-styled-Superman Shaquille O’Neal before him. And my shirt was in the garbage can. But Howard left in 2012. Why was this the moment I decided to expose the world (my future wife) to this level of unbridled aggression? I didn’t get pushed over the edge when Howard orchestrated the ousting of our genius head coach. It wasn’t when he left. Why now?
I had, in fact, been diligent in my determination to not hate Dwight Howard. Hating Howard would have meant I had to write off seasons where he was the centerpiece, and an entire era of Magic basketball that I’d rather treasure. Unless you’re a fan of the two or three teams per decade that dominate the championship conversation, you might not get many chances to root for a contender. Your fandom is most often stuck on the mediocrity treadmill… or worse. Just getting close to a championship, like the Magic did in ’09, is like being the parent of a newborn who gets close to a full night of sleep. No, it isn’t good enough, but it still feels AMAZING.
But then Superman went and said this nonsense:
"My team in Orlando was a team full of people that nobody wanted, and I was their leader."
I believe in a player’s right to live and work where they want. I think we have to acknowledge AT LEAST that, especially when we’re talking about a sports league where mostly white “owners” control and make profits off the labor of mostly brown men. Yes, the people with the actual talent should have at least a modicum of control over how that talent is utilized.
And speaking of “owners,” I certainly don’t hold a grudge against anyone who wants to end their association with the DeVos family, the “owners” of the Magic franchise. After all, the DeVos family gave us Amway-this-is-not-a-pyramid-scheme. They also count among their number a candidate for “Worst Member of Trump’s Cabinet,” a particularly auspicious title.
That would be Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. She was so unqualified for her position that even a Republican majority couldn’t seal her confirmation, with two Senators voting against before DeVos was saved by a Pence tiebreaker. Those Republican Senators might have been put off by her utter lack of educational bona fides, or maybe it was her suggestion that rural schools needed to be armed for defense against grizzly bears.
Yep, just like that.
There are legitimate reasons to leave a franchise. But don’t prop yourself up in an article down the road, Dwight, claiming a depth of leadership experience, Dwight, while taking a total and complete dump on your former teammates.
Don’t do that to J.J. Redick. Don’t do that to Rashard Lewis. Don’t do it to Hedo Turkoglu, who is literally the best professional basketball to ever be born in Turkey – that’s an entire country, Dwight! It’s clear now that Jameer Nelson was carrying you, like he cradled the basketball on his drives through the lane.
With one terrible statement, Dwight Howard had finally done something I found unforgiveable, and someone, SOMEONE had to stand up for the exceedingly tall, internationally celebrated, millionaires he derided. I was going to be that someone, that hero, defending their collective honor against this even taller, even more celebrated, and better-paid millionaire.
So, I urinated on my Dwight Howard shirt, or set fire to it a little, or buried it under some stinky old vegetables.
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There’s a lot of talk about forgiveness right now.
Joe Biden has been declared President-elect of the United States as the result of a free and fair election in which more Americans cast ballots than in any other presidential election, ever. The turnout of eligible voters was at its highest percentage since 1900, and you can count me among the people who are relieved that when the people spoke, this is what they chose to say.
But as Republicans slink toward an honest reckoning with their party’s defeat, I’m hearing all this talk about how liberals should treat Trump supporters with kindness, forgiving their support of a pseudo-dictator – because he was OUR pseudo-dictator! - and other brands of horseshit. I can’t tell if this is a real thing, this forgiveness agenda, and I can’t tell if the talk about it is prevalent, or if it’s just loud.
I guess the proposition is this: in order for our nation to come together, we must forgive the red hat crew. Then we heal. Be kind, rewind.
But forgiveness requires commitment. It’s the essential ingredient.
My wife and I have about three or four fights a year, every year, no more or less. An argument never feels good when we’re in it, but outside of the moment, we tend to agree that this amount of disagreement feels just right. The fights are always hard, but forgiveness is inevitable, because we have an abundance of commitment. We share the same values, and we committed, in front of a crew of other ragamuffins, to hold each other up above all other people and things. We actively chose and choose one another, every day.
And my commitment to my son is so deep that I struggle to even imagine something for which he couldn’t be forgiven.
I can’t say the same thing about the rotten guy down the street who loves him some Trump-flavored misogyny. I don’t feel compelled to forgive him.
I won’t forgive the murderer in Kenosha.
I believe in restorative justice, or I at least try to believe in it, but these people will not have my forgiveness.
What is my commitment to them? What commitment could I possibly receive from them in return that I could actually trust? We have no shared history that indicates my trust would be rewarded.
With every day that members of the Republican leadership refuse to acknowledge the results of our free and fair election, faith in democracy erodes both here and abroad. If we don’t even share a commitment to a structure meant to oppose dictatorship, then how the hell am I supposed to make the leap to forgiveness?
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I don’t know how I came to forgive Dwight Howard. It feels like it just… happened.
Things didn’t go well for him on the Lakers. Howard didn’t mesh with Kobe Bryant, who shared a reputation with Michael Jordan before him of being a pseudo-dictator in his own right. Both men were considered capable of great cruelty in pursuit of their goals. Fortunately for basketball fans, neither man was entrusted with the nuclear codes, or responsible for our national emergency response, or international policy. Jordan still sells a lot of shoes, but his whims can’t tank economy.
Howard left the Lakers after one season, finding his way to Houston. He had one more All-Star season there, before slipping into a cycle of injury and annoyance. He could always be counted on to grab double-digit rebounds, when healthy, but also could be counted upon to eventually grate on his teammates to the point that keeping the center on the roster was untenable, no matter how reliable his production.
Howard lost the gasp-inducing athleticism that made him a three-time Defensive Player of the Year with the Magic, but he was still on track for the Hall of Fame upon retirement, even without a championship on his resume. And getting that ring seemed unlikely. He was toiling in the league’s doldrums, Charlotte, Washington, and the personality issues that followed Howard everywhere made him an unappealing candidate to join any team that was serious about chasing a title.
Then he signed a short make-good contract with the Los Angeles Lakers before the beginning of the 2019-20 season. You know, the season that finished almost a year after it began? And when the last game was done, Dwight Howard was an NBA Champion.
I was really happy for him. Genuinely happy. I didn’t think about his betrayal of the Magic or his teammates or his failures as I watched him celebrate the Lakers’ strange corona-tinged title. And he’s still a freakish collection of fast-twitch muscle fibers, unfailingly goofy, a Greek statue with dad jokes. And he did the thing! He won, sublimating his natural Dwight-ness to be a complementary bench player for a team with two of the world’s top-5 talents.
Dwight’s still smiling. He doesn’t look that much different from when I met him. Fifteen years ago, I went to a draft party at the NBA City restaurant at Universal City Walk. I was bellied up to the bar, and behind it was Howard, still only nineteen and fresh off a third-place finish in Rookie of the Year voting. He flashed that magnetic smile all night, the same grin that would later be used by a horde of analysts to “prove” he didn’t take the game seriously enough. His forearms looked as big as my thighs, and I was not a small person. He was so damn likable, but that isn’t the reason he’s been forgiven.
I was never actually committed to him. I peed on that blue t-shirt, or burned it, or dirtied it, but there are still blue t-shirts in my dresser drawer. They’re threadbare, cheap giveaways from Game 3 of the 2009 NBA Finals, and I wear them because they bear no players’ names. They celebrate the Orlando Magic, a team that has my forever kind of commitment. Those t-shirts celebrate a monumental time in the team’s history, even if it didn’t end the way we hoped. Very few people get a happy ending, but there’s still a lot of happiness to be had.
There are too many people on this planet to make a meaningful commitment to all of them. Even if you could make that large of a promise, wouldn’t its ubiquity render it meaningless?
No, there’s no point in committing to blanket forgiveness, a soothing kindness and concern for those who would have gladly sacrificed the lives of many for the enrichment of the few. But there will be people who will be forgiven by each of us, within our own worlds. Commitments will be remembered and hope renewed. Because if we give ourselves enough time, if there are memories, memories of joy and moments of beauty, then forgiveness may emerge one day, unexpectedly, and with a smile.
But the guy down the street… I don’t have any good memories with you, and no hope. You can go @#$% yourself.
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What I’m Up To
My creative work has been so scattered this last week – not sure where the distractions came from. Hmmm…
What I’m Into
I’m reading The Great Gatsby. Your high school English teacher highly recommends it.
Let’s Head Out To
I was chatting with my buddy Curtis this week and discussion of Luther Vandross naturally led to discussion of his involvement on David Bowie’s Young Americans album, even though Bowie was neither young, nor American – discuss.
I too have been having a hard time with this kumbaya crap after 4 years of tearing babies away from parents and throwing them in cages (as long as they’re brown, of course), self-dealing, constant deceit, the firehouse of scandal and just plain cruelty, and all topped off with the death of nearly a quarter of a million people while our intrepid president golfs and plots his next money-making scheme.
The first time around, I thought maybe people voted for him because they thought the crassness, misogyny, homophobia, why-have-nuclear-weapons-unless-you’re-gonna-use-em was just shtick. A performance. Second time around, there was no question who Trump really is. So it’s hard for me not to see Trump voters as people like him. And there’s no forgiveness there. So if I have to write them off, no loss. I have come to terms with the fact that for me, forevermore, there will be Trump voters and there will be decent people, and there is no intersecting subset in that particular Venn diagram.