We seek out excellence in sports. If we didn’t, we would be just as happy watching the Arena Football League as we would the NFL. Finding the best game wouldn’t matter as much as finding a game, any game.
We watch the NCAA tournament with the same amount of enthusiasm as we always have. The upsets are just as exciting, the coaching matchups just as intriguing, the office pools just as fun. But we know, on some level, that we’re watching an inferior product to the one we watched even 10 years ago. It’s not that the style of basketball is any worse. It’s that the stars are missing.
We’ll never again see a Magic Johnson face a Larry Bird in an NCAA championship game. If we’re lucky, we’ll catch a passing glimpse of a Lew Alcindor or an Elvin Hayes or a Michael Jordan. We were lucky to get Carmelo Anthony for a year. We’re not going to see many fully formed stars in college basketball anymore. We’re going to have to tap our toes impatiently while 18-year-old players try to develop in the NBA.
That’s not the pining for the past by a hopeless romantic. That’s just the truth and the pity.
Greatness. Are we seeing greatness? I think we all know the answer to that question, if we force ourselves to step back and not let the frenetic energy of the NCAA tournament carry us away. We’re seeing great efforts, but let’s not mistake that for greatness. Let’s not mistake heat for fire.
If you want to know why college basketball and the NBA have fallen off so dramatically, I encourage you to check out the EA Roundball Classic, also known as “Everything That’s Wrong with Sports These Days.” The game, which will be played Wednesday night at the United Center, features some of the best high school players in the country.
Yes, the stars will be out. The problem is that these stars are so young, they were a twinkle in their parents’ eyes only last week. As many as 10 players scheduled to compete Wednesday could skip college and enter the NBA draft. A few of them will become superstars in the pros. Most of them will struggle. Many of them will have made a mistake by not getting experience in college.
Everybody loses except the shoe companies, who always can count on a long line of horses eager to be shoed. The man who runs the EA Roundball Classic, Sonny Vaccaro, works for Reebok, in case you wondered whose palm was being, um, slapped.
George Raveling, who was a college coach before selling what was left of his soul to Nike, has tried to sanitize the dirty reality of a major corporation recruiting high school sophomores to wear its basketball shoes. It’s like Microsoft or Harvard trying to recruit your son, Raveling recently told the Tribune.
I wonder how long it took Raveling to do the moral and intellectual gymnastics necessary to spit out that comparison. I’m sure we all have our own personal stories about a Harvard dean wining and dining our 16-year-olds between puffs on his pipe.
The bottom line here is that the shoe companies, the AAU teams, the summer coaches and the all-star games are a package of poison for basketball. No one can argue Eddy Curry was better off going pro than learning the game in college and tasting success. Same with Tyson Chandler. . Same with lots of players. But all that glitz and all those “advisers” told them they were ready.
No one can argue college basketball is better off with the serious talent drain, and nobody can argue the NBA is better off with talented kids who don’t know how to play the game well enough yet.
Would you like some good news in the middle of this lament? One of the best things about Illinois’ Sweet 16 team is that, although it is young and blessed with talent, it is not wildly talented. It’s hard to picture any of the Illini declaring for the June draft. Whatever happens this season could be a prelude to something even greater next season.
The sideshow Wednesday will be NBA general managers falling all over each other’s briefcases to ogle the phenoms. Many of those executives don’t feel good about what they’re doing, but they would feel worse if they missed the next LeBron James.
It would be great if one of them said he’d draft only players with at least two years of college experience. What a hero he’d be, and how unemployed.
