THE DEMONS OF THE PAST. Charlie's succeeded in baiting me out of Tapped semi-retirement with this post. I went and looked up Fred Barnes's article "From Bradley to Barkley" and I have to say that it's pretty definitively the worst piece of sports writing ever. It isn't actually an "attempt to re-cast the NBA as a 'conservative' sport based on the fact that one of its stars was Charles Barkley, who then was making silly mouth-noises about being a Republican." Rather, the conservatism of mid-1990s pro hoops is grounded in a larger schematic. Liberal sports are "non-violent ( mostly), collective, and less than triumphal -- in a word, McGovernesque." Sports "where violence is supposed to be kept to a minimum and intricate teamwork matters, are liberal." So far, so good clich�. Then comes the trouble. Barnes places football in with the rightwing no-teamwork sports. This is, I promise you, a conclusion you could only reach if you'd literally never seen a football game. Meanwhile baseball, a series of one-on-one individual matchups if ever there was one, is lumped in with the collectivist lefty sports. The argument about the NBA, meanwhile, is a bit absurd. The decline of the timid, namby-pamby, college-style "white" game in favor of the above-the-rim athleticism of the contemporary "black" game in the modern NBA is said to herald a rising tide of conservatism because, apparently, there's no teamwork involved in it. Honestly, the less said about that theory the better, but the fact remains that Barnes happened to have been writing while the best team in NBA history -- the 1996 Chicago Bulls -- were marching their way into the history books. This was, definitively, a team effort, a fact underscored rather than undermined by the presence of the game's greatest individual talent in Michael Jordan. He had a fantastic second-banana in Scottie Pippen, a dominant rebounder in Dennis Rodman, an ace spot-up shooter in Steve Kerr, a fantastic passer in Toni Kukoc -- in short, a wide range of players with complementary skills working together to wipe the floor with the opposition.
--Matthew Yglesias
