Star Search

If you love sports skills competitions, then the NBA's slam dunk contest used to be your Super Bowl. It was always more beautiful, more exciting than the Home Run Derby or the NFL's fastest man competition. It was creative men flying, and in the eighties, the creative men who flew were superstars. They were iconic. They did things that people wanted to take pictures of, and today, we still want to see those pictures.

Today though, there is no luster, and the end of All-Star Saturday night every year feels like a let-down from a promising date:

"...She made idea of going back to her place seem so enticing, until we actually did. Then she was in the bathroom for a half hour. Then she couldn't decide what kind of music to play. Then she couldn't get comfortable. But she looked good, and most importantly, still looked like a woman, so I tried to make the best of it, and even I couldn't make it good..."

and you feel the same way you feel when Nate Robinson misses another dunk, or when Dwight Howard runs out of dumb ideas.

Jay-Z' voice plays in your head:

"Look at my face...I'm uncomfortable dawg."

How do we get comfortable? Bring the stars back. Lure the stars back.

First, the prize money should be upward of one million dollars. This should be a non-negotiable. Also, Sprite, the regular contest sponsor, should sign the winner to an endorsement contract for a year. The compensation in the deal should be undisclosed but generous. If Lebron James is the winner, it would be expected and encouraged by one of his corporate sponsors.

Next, Improve the trophy. Make it the "Michael Jordan Award for Dunking." Make it a pristine golden statuette of Mike dunking from the free-throw line. Give the winner a matching patch to wear on his jersey for a year that acknowledges him as the leagues premier dunker. If you think that's silly, see what it does for merchandise sales.

Last, bring back the old format. The original fifty-point, five-round scale worked because the stars carried it, and stars will carry nearly anything in any sport. Remember the end of our date? What if the woman was different?

"...I'm telling you, nothing went right, but we laughed, we kissed, when things could have gotten awkward for me, she saved the day by smiling or saying something I thought was amazing. And the date went on, and it's still going on..."

and you feel the same way you did when Gerald Green blew out the candle.

Because you like each other.

And we like stars.

Rudy

Rudy

Rudy

You were a bad-ass too, admit it...

I know many people my age with young children, both single and married. It is the thing to do and get done in your late-twenties, but I also knew some of these people when they were children, and in a strange way, I find their intense and heavily doctrinal parenting to be terribly hypocritical. There is no fault in having a family, especially if you've taken the financial steps to control one, but these people raise these children outside of the memory of themselves. They suppress the child I knew; the cigarette smoking, fellatio inclined, shoplifting girls and boys that I spent my youth with. They exercise what remains of those youthful rebellious emotions on the weekends, when they can attend night clubs and slowly understand the gap between our generation and the next younger.

They are doing the same things our parents did until they figured out that their children were in their twenties and had raised themselves, understood consequences themselves. I speak to them and they live double-lives with split-personalities. They read both children's and adult books, they are well-skilled at both playing, and playing the field. If they are married, life is their children, work is for their family, and life can become, for most Americans, as hopeless as that sounds. But this is a plan, a passed-down plan that most of us believe in. We think that the weak simply can't maintain it, the even weaker never do it. We respect the great people in our nation, but we respect them more when they've developed a growing, healthy family.

So why can't all of us be great? Why can't parents simply connect with their children the way our parents were supposed to? In our rebellious times, it was understanding we needed. We were raised in the mold of people who chose not to truly understand us, and my generation was raised wholly on television and the idea of extra-familial role models. The best way to show a child that you care, is not through intense doctrine and bragging that you've maintained.

Everyone maintains. They love their families just like you do. Stop pretending to be unique.

The truly unique help their children find importance and reason in things. When you broke the rules, what was the reason? When you suffered consequences, what was the reason? When you're done teaching a toddler how to understand the "who, what, when and where," most of the people I've ever known, failed to understand that the "why and how" need to be taught for the rest of life. And that way, your children will really never repeat your mistakes.

'Roid Scare

In August of 1997, I went to a Sunday afternnon Yankees game on a pristine August day and sat in a middle-of-the-row seat, alone. The Yankees lost to the Mariners. Ken Griffey Jr. made a stellar diving catch, Jose Cruz Jr. hit two home runs, and I wasn't totally upset at the results. This was because my favorite story of the afternoon was of batting practice. Everyone I new and met was immediately told about how that day, Alex Rodriguez hit so many home runs in that batting practice to the black seats in center field that they began to look like four hundred-foot singles in an imaginary ballpark expanded to the talents of an amazing player.

He was twenty-two years-old.

He had already won a batting title and had already been robbed of the Most Valuable Player Award. In the year that he hit .358, 1996, he was a line-drive hitter, falling into the mold of Edgar Martinez, and for most of the early part of the year in 1997, the poor luck of the line drive haunted him. The game I attended though, was near the end of that year, and if you examine Alex Rodriguez' stats from that point on, he is the superstar right-handed, five-tool player of our generation. He is Willie Mays playing the infield. He is premier, and became that after two and a half years in the Major leagues of being a considerably different hitter.

Now he says he's taken steroids.

And if you're the type to fall into the habit of condemning steroid users who you used to idolize, I say, be disappointed when you cheat, the disappointment will lead to accountability, and you will be better for it. But you people who condemn steroid users blanket the topic as you do others. You bury us in the words "steroids" and "cheating." There is an enormous separation between our talents and the talents of professionals, so do not cheapen the experience of sports by attempting to lower athletes like these to our level. We have an even more enormous lack of understanding for the inner workings of the sports world, so the fact that these athletes are cheating against each other should be outside of our realm of knowledge and should be policed by the leagues themselves, without the bombarding media attention. If you think they've cheated the game, then I'd really like to once again question how well you understand the game at that level (there is no keg at third base, you don't have a team vote on the style of the uniform). We absolutely don't need congressional probes- witch-hunts and McCarthyism that lasts a decade, so that the end of that decade, testimonies and urine samples won't match, and ballplayers will be lugged off in handcuffs.

The only reason I suppose that the media was so ready to cover this and the common people were so ready to converse about this and I was so ready to write a blog and not before, was that Alex Rodriguez is a real superstar. I find myself hearing more feedback about his appearance than his talents from people. His body language or hair, are viable topics of conversation in most places in New York City. This is quite important to the people who find their enjoyment in the wholly unimportant, and its caused me to see the game for what its become, and love it the same as I once did.