Destroy and Rebuild

I tell my personal Barry Bonds story fairly regularly. It's a story about remaining willfully naive. It goes like this:

I was the last person to accept that Barry Bonds took steroids. His sudden, unparalleled production was so exciting and tantalizing that easily surrendering those precious commodities to resigned cynicism felt like the actual crime. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, as Bonds endeavored to wrestle control of such a hidebound sport away from the long-secure clutches of Ruth, Mays, and Aaron, he presented a sports fan with the kind of transcendent athletic performance that affirms one's faith in science. Like a Usain Bolt, a Michael Jordan, a Michael Johnson, or a Tiger Woods, Bonds appeared to be something different and better than the rest of us mere humans. He was evolution. Casting aside a rare phenomenon as just another cheap illusion felt wrong.

Bonds was everywhere to me back then. Blissfully living a college lifestyle composed of all-nighters just for fun, far too much soda just because I could, and enough Napster to break a university ethernet, I never thought that making time to feel mesmerized by the same highlights on a loop was a bad choice. So I watched Bonds all the time, and I felt as though I was living through a historic epic with every home run, every .OPS point, and every walk. Oddly enough, it was the walks that usually did it for me--those were the plays that would get my voice intermittently squeaking with excitement. Bonds had transformed--and, sadly, that was a word far too appropriate--into such a devastating offensive force that the rules of baseball no longer applied. He had surpassed the sport, itself. That's fucking cool, and I probably uttered some profane exclamation like that multiple times a day. What else but such a simple, expansive figurative shrug, or the occasional excited shriek sent up to the high heavens, could accommodate the magnitude of the moment?

When I could no longer deny that Bonds was far from a natural force of change, I was stung by the disappointment. Don't get it twisted: my hero hadn't been exposed as a villain. That would have required an investment in Bonds as a role model, and I never went that far. Rather, I felt as though I had lived a lie. I had invested tremendous emotional resources in the notion that I was curating an unmatched moment in human development, only to find out that I'd really just devoted myself to a common failing of the species. I remain rueful of Bonds not for using drugs, breaking a law I don't care about, or dishonoring baseball, but for misleading my propensity to celebrate the uncommon. He extracted something I guard closely and cherish.



Spending those formative years with Bonds animated a concept to which I often return, particularly as a sports fan. His deception was unsettling not for what it was, using steroids, but for what it meant, betraying my wonderment. I remain indifferent to the specifics of his transgression but still feel the wound he left by cheating history to begin with.

I feel the same way about the University of North Carolina as the details of its corrupt football program emerge. Of course, I have no personal connection to UNC. No one in my family went there, and I've only been in the state but three times. Nor do I pay close attention to Tar Heel football. However, I grew up in a household where Dean Smith was not just a basketball deity but a civil rights hero; I have spent my life rooting for Tar Heel basketball because it seemed disrespectful to do otherwise; and I have met enough UNC alumni to reasonably suspect that Chapel Hill might have offered me the sort of revered experience I found in Ann Arbor. The UNC football scandal hasn't upset me for what it is. To paraphrase Roy Williams from an earlier time, I could give a shit about North Carolina players getting money. Instead, I am upset by what it means, because I had clung to a quixotic notion of UNC. But if even North Carolina is breaking rules, I can no longer enjoy the insulation of willful naivete.

This really isn't about the money. Given the revenue that college football and basketball generate, the players should probably be paid. Especially since recruiting an elite prospect is often tantamount to a spending contest, with schools competing to show off shiny new buildings and whatever other NCAA-sanctioned baubles they've amassed. Given the not-so-apocryphal stories about Terrelle Pryors driving around in brand new Corvettes, or proven scandals ranging from the Fab Five to Reggie Bush, the influence of money, of agents, of street runners, of handlers, and of everyone else barely registers. Amateurism ain't shit. But breaking the rules is, and for a long time, despite the expansive terrain across which misdeeds of all varieties festered, I was able to believe that in some ivory towers, the righteous rituals of college athletics, no matter how hollow or changed, persisted without the taint of cheating.

No place was as mythically pure as North Carolina. (I hate that the preceding sentence sounds like a Win Butler lyric.) From a distance, I could venerate the entire university. Not only has the basketball program been a canon of my life's ideology, but so much of what I know (I've chosen to "know"?) about the university has suited my romanticism. Everything from the quality of the education and mission as a public school to the university colors and infectious fight song. I've always understood that much of my perception was projection, but so long as I could trust in UNC's quintessence as an idealized American university, I didn't really concern myself with the specifics. Again, why would I? It was a symbol. The symbol has been undermined by this scandal, though, because the emotional sports fan in me who fights off my usual skepticism is disappointed by again confronting an underwhelming reality. That is the real loss element for me. Butch Davis, John Blake, Marvin Austin--those are just names.





As I've read about North Carolina, my sense of loss, and my sense of entitlement to that low moment, has been amplified by two conversations I had yesterday. At this point, the two people with whom I discuss sports most openly, emotionally, and viscerally are my father and Shoals. Each provided a tonic to the North Carolina story while encouraging my unadulterated moment of feeling.

My father excitedly texted me earlier this week that Kim Jong-un loves the NBA. Always inclined to a droll conflation of the serious and the absurd, my father and I instantly took up the subject with enthusiasm, each of us recognizing that this revelation was fodder for a few months of schtick, at least. (We are, after all, the "men" who thought it would be funny if my ne'er-do-well cousin tormented my ninety-plus Jewish grandmother by converting to Islam and changing his name to Matush, the guy on The Sopranos who was dealing drugs at the Crazy Horse and stabbed someone.) Soon, the text led to a phone call during which we speculated about whether my dad could beat Jong-un in a one-on-one; whether Jong-un was prone to that choppy, hacking street ball that my father and I ascribe to non-European foreigners (no one said we were perfect); whether Jong-un might replicate my forays into America's heartland by coming stateside for a tour of second- and third-tier NBA cities like Indianapolis and Oklahoma City; and, of course, whether, Barack Obama and Jong-un would play each other in some kind of high-stakes basketball diplomacy. Only after Jong-un becomes supreme leader, of course.

And then, finally, there was an email exchange, during which we decided that no player was a better embodiment for the North Korean spirit than Anthony Mason. (Twitter was so amused that the internets came up with this.) I can only imagine that Mase is in Pyongyang as we speak, showing Jong-un how to box out with malice. In sum, our new-found focus on Jong-un's rising basketball star was the kind of whimsical sports digression which regularly replenishes the wonderment jeopardized by the Carolina scandal. So I guess that means I'll be back?

As I sort that out, I'll arrive at some new stasis informed by an ensuing conversation with Shoals. As I bemoaned the damage that Carolina's brand would incur, the taint, however subtle, that would attach to the basketball program, and my wounded innocence, Shoals reminded me that the Carolina incident may inflict greater harm to college sports than to UNC. After all, if even North Carolina is being investigated, what hope is there? Our dialogue then wandered into various other niche topics, but dejection was quickly replaced by indignation as I remembered a crucial point that Shoals encouraged:

Why is North Carolina being investigated? Why not, say, Michigan State? Whereas otherwise clean UNC is now a sensational whipping boy--and for breaking the rules, it deserves punishment--Michigan State is hoping that you don't notice two of its basketball players being accused of sexual assault. Just as the school would likely prefer that you disregard Korie Lucious driving drunk, Glenn Winston putting a Michigan State hockey player in the hospital, twelve football players brawling with an MSU fraternity, Dion Sims stealing laptops, and Chris Allen's mysterious basketball departure. And that these things all happened in the last two years.

I don't condone rule breaking, but as the NCAA invades Chapel Hill instead of East Lansing or Gainesville, it's difficult to maintain much faith in the system's purported morals or much ire for a relatively benign agent scandal. I'm not sayin', but I'm sayin'....