bound to be picked by anyone but the celtics
I disagree with Dave Zirin sometimes (I don't think race is always the place where politics begins and ends in sports) and I'm mad for the Spurs and Timmy Duncan in particular, but Dave's latest should make halfway-intelligent sports fans (and everyone else we can file under Giving A Shit) all over the country sit up straight and pay attention to the fallout from the 2004-05 NBA season, especially when you consider the game is probably one of the last bastions for a kind of athelete who isn't a total Neanderthal:
Standing up to the Piston's backlash meant standing up to this tide. It also meant standing with perhaps the most maligned player in the NBA not named Ron Artest: Rasheed Wallace.
A second Wallace championship would have been a sweet sight indeed. Last year, there was perhaps no greater moment in sports than seeing Rasheed Wallace stand triumphant next to seething NBA commissioner David Stern. Imagine George W. Bush's face if he had to give the Congressional Medal of Honor to Moqtada Al-Sadr, or if Ariel Sharon was forced to host a tribute to Edward Said. That was Stern's reaction to celebrating 'Sheed. This is animus writ large - rife with reverberations that extend far beyond a clashing of personality and ego.
It was only 18 months ago when Wallace laid a verbal smackdown on Stern, saying, "I see behind the lines. I see behind the false screens. I know what this business is all about. I know the commissioner of this league makes more than three-quarters of the players in this league... They look at black athletes like we're dumb-ass n------. It's as if we're just going to shut up, sign for the money and do what they tell us."
Stern, who is challenged about as often as Vito Corleone in an Olive Garden, shot back, "Mr. Wallace's hateful diatribe was ignorant and offensive to all NBA players. I refuse to enhance his heightened sense of deprivation by publicly debating with him."
This year, it would have been even more fun to see an encore. Recently, Stern has been hard at work alongside Republican arch-strategist Matthew Dowd about how to "help the NBA's appeal in the red states." Wallace, meanwhile, visited the White House last year along with the Championship Pistons, stopping just long enough to say, "I don't have shit to say to [Bush]. I didn't vote for him. It's just something we have to do."
Herein lies the heart of the Stern/Wallace conflict. It is really about the future of the NBA, and whether the league will adapt to a right wing climate in the country by muzzling its players. It doesn't matter that Wallace is a skilled big man willing to take big shots in the fourth quarter, play tough defense and be entirely unselfish with the ball. Stern wants him to go away because he represents a block against what NBA suits want the league to become.
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