Posted in On the DL Podcast
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11/4 2010

DL468: John Wall vs. Colin Cowherd & Kevin Garnett vs. Sticks and Stones

Posted by Dan Levy.

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Hey, look…we talk about the NBA! I’m as surprised as you (note, more NBA talk coming soon.)

Nick and I discuss the comments by ESPN pundit and attention grabber Colin Cowherd, who said yesterday that John Wall is an idiot and a bad human being and, well, here are some of his words, via DC Sports Bog:

“J Wow’s 37-second Yo dawg look at me I’m the man [dance], and his wild, out-of-control style, everybody else is buying his stock, and it told me all I need to know. He’s gonna end up on the Iverson, Francis, Starbury [side]: great stats, nine All-Star teams, never play with good smart players and an elite head coach. He’s gonna drive people nuts.

“My daughter’s 10. Ten years old. She knows the difference between right and wrong. My daughter knows what Randy Moss did is wrong. She’s 10. The haves get it early, the have-nots never do. Look at me, I’m great, I’m unbelievable.”

Please click the link because there is way more ridiculousness to read, but I just had to grab the part where he said, “Look at me, I’m great, I’m unbelievable” without any sense of irony.

We take the opportunity to discuss Cowherd’s routine, that I caffeinatedly call Shock Jock Schlock, and how mindlessly ignorant his comments about Wall’s game on the court are. Of course, as Steinberg pointed out, Cowherd just did this to get attention. So he wins. Sort of. See, he can have all the attention he wants and you can spend 20 minutes listening to us lambast him…in that way he wins. But, hopefully three fewer people will listen to him after listening to us, or Bomani Jones or reading Steinberg. Eventually, the audience will go away. People will get tired of his schlock. He won’t win then.

The issue in all of this is the fact that I, too, hate the dancing. I hate it. I hate it so much Jack Kogod called me the worst person in the world because I told him I hate it. Maybe it’s a Kentucky thing. Maybe it’s a Calipari thing, but I have hated Wall’s dancing from the first day he did it.

Wait, that’s not true. I’ve hated it since it got a name. I’ve hated it since it became a national phenomenon. The kid is a teenager with his own dance, and I hate the pedestal we put these kids on, only to rip them when they get too big of a head to stay balanced up there. We can all do the John Wall dance or clap when he does the Dougie, but let’s remember that when we crush him in five years for his version of The Decision. We created LeBron James, and now hate him for what he’s become. Yet, to me, we don’t learn from that with the next great phenom.

Maybe if LeBron had a dance…

STICKS AND STONES…

We discuss the PR spin from Kevin Garnett. Sadly it doesn’t include my motivational poster, but it does include this:

“I would never be insensitive to the brave struggle that cancer patients endure,” Garnett said in the statement. “I have lost loved ones to this deadly disease and have a family member currently undergoing treatment. I would never say anything that distasteful.”

Garnett claims he said Villanueva was “cancerous to your team and our league” which is somehow not as bad as calling him a cancer patient. If you believe him, which many media types do not. Take Yahoo’s esteemed basketball scribe Adrian Wojnarowski, who lambasted Garnett for being a bully, using a parallel to a former NBA player who had to defend his words with his fists:

For all the instances of Garnett’s bullying available on YouTube, those two words – “cancer patient” – will never go away. This is the one that people will remember, the stain that’ll be hardest to wash away. Garnett’s 34 years old, and shamefully a man too smart – too principled in a lot of ways – to act like this. Only, he’s done it for years, and it’s now a bigger part of his legacy than an old Boston Celtics champion will want to believe.

The NBA lost one of its true tough guys this week, a cancer patient named Maurice Lucas. He came out of a different time in the NBA, and never talked like Kevin Garnett. There was never a need. He had to back it up, the way K.G. never has and never will. The true tough guys never have to tell you about it.

That’s how Woj ended his column. First, it’s unfair to further indict Garnett’s asinine comments by putting them in the context of someone actually dying of cancer. It’s trash talk on the basketball court — ill-conceived trash talk, but trash talk nonetheless. Having said that, Woj compares Garnett to Maurice Lucas, a phenomenal basketball player and, per Woj, a certifiable tough guy who never talked trash like Garnett, or at least never did it without backing it up with more than words.

Woj, of course, probably wouldn’t know that other than second-hand testimony as he wasn’t covering the league at the time Lucas played (he graduated high school a year before Lucas retired). Having said that, he could be right that Lucas did more talking with his fists than his poor word choice, but did that make him better than Garnett? Take this story from the 1977 NBA Finals, per Wiki:

With the 76ers comfortably ahead late in the game, the Blazers streaked down the floor on a fast break. Lionel Hollins missed the shot, both Bob Gross and Darryl Dawkins went up and wrestled for the rebound, and both came crashing to the floor. The two appeared ready to come to punches before Lucas slapped Dawkins from behind and challenged him to fight him instead of Gross. Both benches emptied and Dawkins and Lucas were ejected.

To be clear, Woj chided Garnett for being a bully, and hoped he starts to act more like a guy who hit another player from behind during the NBA finals. A sucker punch (or slap) is contextually less offensive than cancer references. Good to know.

This isn’t just to rip on Woj (though to be fair, I admit we do that). It’s more to illustrate that media people should maybe, JUST MAYBE, get off the high-horse on this one. Garnett is a jerk, sure. But so are a lot of players and it’s certainly not the worst thing anyone’s said on a basketball court. It was stupid, but it’s not going to taint his legacy forever.

It’s amazing some of you can type that with such heavy hands.

Thanks for listening. We have an interesting question in housekeeping as well, so please listen to the end.

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Posted on November 4, 2010 at 9:50AM

 

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