I would argue a few things about the relationship between bored and enthusiasm in regard to competition:
First is that, in a perhaps narrow, technical, sense F1 isn't a sport, and doesn't simply 'elevate' competition but, in fact, is pure competition. Sport, at least to me, involves, or can involve, spontaneous and un-premeditated, effort. While I do enjoy F1, the effort, such as it is, is pre-determined in the technical setup of the vehicle, and is not really that spontaneous, within the narrow confines of the unchanging racetrack. F1 is a competition that is a sublime mix of brute force and subtle technical mastery that can look robotic and when a driver is dominant, kinda is robotic. It's only after you drill down, understand the effort and the physics that you can really appreciate the effort.
Secondly, F1 is faceless. For very obvious reasons competitors are behind protective equipment and you cannot see or feel any emotion. The thing about a basketball third quarter with one side holding a thirty point lead is that any dominance is precarious: it can and often does narrow; but one can SEE the anguish and the effort. One can see if the dominant team continues to press or becomes complacent, risking losing their dominance. You can see if the opposing team is giving up or giving all. You were there when the Celtics were down by twenty-two going into the fourth when Antoine Walker started really motivating in the huddle and they came back. THAT was a game! And even when Wilt Chamberlain dropped one-hundred points in one game against an opponent, in a still-unrivaled display of dominance, it remained watchable as he dunked.
Consider the other sport that is essentially faceless, football. While individual actions can seem robotic, there are so many different individual actions going on, and always the possibility of a 'broken play,' that a game where a team is dominant team can still be interesting. And, not for nothing, football is a filmed sport where the cameras spent (I would argue) an in-ordinate amount of time filming the sidelines, when the helmets are off and the faces are seen. So the NFL isn't completely faceless as, essentially, F1 is, since drivers are only seen before and after the competition, never during.
The whole Danny Ainge v Paul Pierce thing was a little more than just my love of The Truth, though that remains a big component. It also speaks to a certain perspective on individual dominance in the game that is germane to your piece.
Paul Pierce was often compared to Kobe Bryant, in playing style and temperament, but once, when asked why he (Pierce) didn't regularly score thirty points a game, like Bryant, he simply looked puzzled and said 'I give each game what it needs.' This was, perhaps, an implicit rebuke to Bryant who, fairly or not, had a reputation for giving each game what Kobe needed... But also acknowledgement of something a lot of people simply don't get: Basketball is, first and foremost a game that relies on chemistry between players. To 'give the game what it needs' is to recognize that the game is bigger than you. (You've heard me say it before: Michael Jordan once scored sixty-three points in a game... that his Bulls lost ---and, for the record, lost to the Celtics. Michael Jordan wasn't "Michael Jordan" until he started playing with Scottie Pippen. Chemistry counts. ). In no small part, misunderstanding this is why the entire sport of basketball has suffered so, in the wake of Michael Jordan and the whole idea of a 'franchise' player. Antoine Walker. Vince Carter. Allen Iverson. I could go on. The NBA of the 90's and early 2000's is littered with 'shoulda beens who never were' as the GM tried to throw money at one player and and give them a supporting cast only.
This is, I think, the root of my dislike for Danny Aint: from 2003, when he began his tenure in Celtics management, to 2008 when the C's won the championship. During that time he traded furiously and ceaselessly, overturning almost the entire roster at least once a season, sometimes more: churning through players at such a pace that the players could not develop the chemistry necessary to be truly championship calibre. He had no patience. No willingness to wait and let a team come together. With the exception of Paul Pierce, Ainge constantly and consistently rotated out most of the other positions. As well as being frustrating to fans, it must have put tremendous, and undue, pressure on the players, including Pierce. ( It's kinda like in baseball, when one pitcher is brought in for one at-bat, because of some characteristic of the batter... Those three to nine pitches cost more in effort, anguish and consequences than for the pitcher who throws one hundred pitches in a game. )
It is extraordinarily difficult---I would argue impossible---for one player to dominate the game for more that one or two games, never mind a series and never a whole season, but that GM's like Ainge often put exactly that pressure on players.
I think Ainge either came to his senses, or just lucked out, when he dealt for Ray Allen and KG. The 'new' Big Three and Kendrick Perkins understood team play. But rather than develop younger players to come in, building strength, as they struggled to repeat, he started trading again, first trading Perk away in 2011 and then not retaining Ray Allen when he became a free agent. Then the ultimate betrayal to the Celtics, trading Pierce, who should have been a career Celtic, like Kobe was a career Laker. To true fans, homers as we say, this is important... To trade such a player--- And to Brooklyn?!?!?!---is amoral.
Great points. I think Brad and Joe are demonstrating perhaps the antithesis of that Ainge line of thinking -- patience (keeping Jaylen Brown, not moving for Kevin Durant), a whole-team mindset... Deals have been made, to be sure; I haven't followed basketball closely enough over the last few years to have grown a particular affinity for Marcus Smart, and what I do remember of him, aside from his DPOY, is the complaints of now-heartbroken Celtics fans who bemoaned his poor shot selection, but ultimately this was a deal made after Smart had already been with the team for a while, lived through a number of Danny's decimations. But now we have both Jayson and Jaylen, and a *strong* cast around them, probably the strongest starting 5 in the league when they're all fit. And, similarly to your Pierce comment, they don't all need to be *on it* every single night for the team to win; no one player feels that pressure. One night it's Jayson, another it's Jaylen, another it's stinkin' Porzingis, with Holiday and Hauser and even Pritchard all happy to pitch in when/where they are needed, proving that they still belong on the team in the role they've been given.
I'm very excited for what this means for the coming months 😉
I would argue a few things about the relationship between bored and enthusiasm in regard to competition:
First is that, in a perhaps narrow, technical, sense F1 isn't a sport, and doesn't simply 'elevate' competition but, in fact, is pure competition. Sport, at least to me, involves, or can involve, spontaneous and un-premeditated, effort. While I do enjoy F1, the effort, such as it is, is pre-determined in the technical setup of the vehicle, and is not really that spontaneous, within the narrow confines of the unchanging racetrack. F1 is a competition that is a sublime mix of brute force and subtle technical mastery that can look robotic and when a driver is dominant, kinda is robotic. It's only after you drill down, understand the effort and the physics that you can really appreciate the effort.
Secondly, F1 is faceless. For very obvious reasons competitors are behind protective equipment and you cannot see or feel any emotion. The thing about a basketball third quarter with one side holding a thirty point lead is that any dominance is precarious: it can and often does narrow; but one can SEE the anguish and the effort. One can see if the dominant team continues to press or becomes complacent, risking losing their dominance. You can see if the opposing team is giving up or giving all. You were there when the Celtics were down by twenty-two going into the fourth when Antoine Walker started really motivating in the huddle and they came back. THAT was a game! And even when Wilt Chamberlain dropped one-hundred points in one game against an opponent, in a still-unrivaled display of dominance, it remained watchable as he dunked.
Consider the other sport that is essentially faceless, football. While individual actions can seem robotic, there are so many different individual actions going on, and always the possibility of a 'broken play,' that a game where a team is dominant team can still be interesting. And, not for nothing, football is a filmed sport where the cameras spent (I would argue) an in-ordinate amount of time filming the sidelines, when the helmets are off and the faces are seen. So the NFL isn't completely faceless as, essentially, F1 is, since drivers are only seen before and after the competition, never during.
The whole Danny Ainge v Paul Pierce thing was a little more than just my love of The Truth, though that remains a big component. It also speaks to a certain perspective on individual dominance in the game that is germane to your piece.
Paul Pierce was often compared to Kobe Bryant, in playing style and temperament, but once, when asked why he (Pierce) didn't regularly score thirty points a game, like Bryant, he simply looked puzzled and said 'I give each game what it needs.' This was, perhaps, an implicit rebuke to Bryant who, fairly or not, had a reputation for giving each game what Kobe needed... But also acknowledgement of something a lot of people simply don't get: Basketball is, first and foremost a game that relies on chemistry between players. To 'give the game what it needs' is to recognize that the game is bigger than you. (You've heard me say it before: Michael Jordan once scored sixty-three points in a game... that his Bulls lost ---and, for the record, lost to the Celtics. Michael Jordan wasn't "Michael Jordan" until he started playing with Scottie Pippen. Chemistry counts. ). In no small part, misunderstanding this is why the entire sport of basketball has suffered so, in the wake of Michael Jordan and the whole idea of a 'franchise' player. Antoine Walker. Vince Carter. Allen Iverson. I could go on. The NBA of the 90's and early 2000's is littered with 'shoulda beens who never were' as the GM tried to throw money at one player and and give them a supporting cast only.
This is, I think, the root of my dislike for Danny Aint: from 2003, when he began his tenure in Celtics management, to 2008 when the C's won the championship. During that time he traded furiously and ceaselessly, overturning almost the entire roster at least once a season, sometimes more: churning through players at such a pace that the players could not develop the chemistry necessary to be truly championship calibre. He had no patience. No willingness to wait and let a team come together. With the exception of Paul Pierce, Ainge constantly and consistently rotated out most of the other positions. As well as being frustrating to fans, it must have put tremendous, and undue, pressure on the players, including Pierce. ( It's kinda like in baseball, when one pitcher is brought in for one at-bat, because of some characteristic of the batter... Those three to nine pitches cost more in effort, anguish and consequences than for the pitcher who throws one hundred pitches in a game. )
It is extraordinarily difficult---I would argue impossible---for one player to dominate the game for more that one or two games, never mind a series and never a whole season, but that GM's like Ainge often put exactly that pressure on players.
I think Ainge either came to his senses, or just lucked out, when he dealt for Ray Allen and KG. The 'new' Big Three and Kendrick Perkins understood team play. But rather than develop younger players to come in, building strength, as they struggled to repeat, he started trading again, first trading Perk away in 2011 and then not retaining Ray Allen when he became a free agent. Then the ultimate betrayal to the Celtics, trading Pierce, who should have been a career Celtic, like Kobe was a career Laker. To true fans, homers as we say, this is important... To trade such a player--- And to Brooklyn?!?!?!---is amoral.
So, there's that.
Great points. I think Brad and Joe are demonstrating perhaps the antithesis of that Ainge line of thinking -- patience (keeping Jaylen Brown, not moving for Kevin Durant), a whole-team mindset... Deals have been made, to be sure; I haven't followed basketball closely enough over the last few years to have grown a particular affinity for Marcus Smart, and what I do remember of him, aside from his DPOY, is the complaints of now-heartbroken Celtics fans who bemoaned his poor shot selection, but ultimately this was a deal made after Smart had already been with the team for a while, lived through a number of Danny's decimations. But now we have both Jayson and Jaylen, and a *strong* cast around them, probably the strongest starting 5 in the league when they're all fit. And, similarly to your Pierce comment, they don't all need to be *on it* every single night for the team to win; no one player feels that pressure. One night it's Jayson, another it's Jaylen, another it's stinkin' Porzingis, with Holiday and Hauser and even Pritchard all happy to pitch in when/where they are needed, proving that they still belong on the team in the role they've been given.
I'm very excited for what this means for the coming months 😉