Full Court Press, by Arthur Tebbel & Chris Toia – Pop Art… and Chris #32

July 14, 2009 Arthur Tebbel & Chris Toia 2 Comments

Dear Art & Chris,

This past week at the Lebron James Skills Academy we had a bit of an incident. Jordan Crawford, a sophomore guard at Xavier University, dunked on LeBron James in an after-hours pick-up game. Following the play, James reportedly summoned me to the court and after we spoke I confiscated all tapes of the incident. Video taping is prohibited at the after-hours scrimmages so we feel our actions were justified. Why is there still so much controversy surrounding this?

-Lynn Merritt, Senior Director, Nike Basketball

Lynn,
This move makes you all at Nike and LeBron James look like giant fucking cowards. If videotaping wasn’t ok why did you wait until after James was dunked on to stop them? I’ll spot you the answer, it’s because if James had done something awesome you would have wanted the video leaked on the Internet. It was only after your $90 million man was embarrassed that you felt the need to clamp down on people. Instead of preserving James’ dominant image it makes us wonder what else we’re missing. Does he spend a lot of time down there crying over bad calls? Does he pick flowers instead of running the fast break? Does he make camp end early so he can catch new episodes of Hannah Montana? Before this week we would have said that those things were certainly not true; now we just don’t know.

As people with levels of athleticism described in adjectives ranging from fair to god-awful you have to appreciate that we like seeing these idols fail sometimes. If Jordan Crawford can dunk on King James who’s to say that we couldn’t some day? You know, besides people who have seen us play basketball before or rudimentary students of physics. We’re not saying that we’re going to dunk on LeBron but seeing someone do it gives us hope for activities that previously seemed impossible. Perhaps now we can finally get 120 stars in Super Mario 64 or interact in a social environment without crying.

If there were shit-talking world championships we’d be first-ballot hall-of-famers. We’re not perfect though. Some days when we’re feeling under the weather or we aren’t expecting it someone is capable of sneaking one by us and bringing us down. You’ve just got to give them their props and move on though. There’s always another day though and on that day we’ll make sure he’s regaled in excruciating detail how many penises have been in his mother’s various orifices simultaneously. The point is everyone has bad plays and you can’t try to run from that. It’s like leaving the court after your team gets eliminated and then refusing to talk to the press. Oh wait.

By now this video would certainly have a million hits on YouTube. However, we all could have seen LeBron being his usual charming self on TV interviews shrugging it off. It should be shrugged off; LeBron is still the greatest player breathing. Now it’s a big deal though; now it’s the forbidden fruit. The dunk that exists in all of our heads is probably worse than the real thing. The days of being able to hold back stuff like this is over. Either it gets out or the act of repressing it makes it 100 times worse. Congratulations you wounded the image of your greatest asset.