Jumpshooting Used to be Swaggy
destroy sports computer
Welcome to this week’s edition of Weed Church. I realized I never linked the piece I put on Defector a few weeks back about Alexander Bedward and August Town. That’s my contribution to Black History Month before some teenager with an Asus laptop tells the president we can save some cash if we cut it back to two weeks.
This week is the start of Abiy Tsom. For those that don’t practice, the Abiy Tsom is a 55-day fast held by the Tewahedo faith as a sacrifice for Iyesus Kiristos. Can’t eat until 3 PM, and sundown is better if you can hack it. No meat. No dairy. Vegetables and legumes and grains. Cook it all at home if you can. The Lord shows favor to those who can use their hands, I’m told.
My fasting meals this week:
Monday: Mushroom and lentil stew
Tuesday: Tahini, eggplant and chickpea stew
Wednesday: Sourdough flatbreads with marinara, mushroom, peppers
Thursday: Vegetable rice soup
Friday: Curry
If Your Coach Isn’t Mad, You Have No Swag
The NBA stinks these days and it’s mostly because of all the three point shooting. This pains me because I am a slow footed man whose only reliable weapon during a long basketball career was a long range jumper. This gives me two levels of pain:
The inevitable (and cliched) “glory days” pain where I think man I wish you were allowed to shoot fifteen 3s a game when I was playing, I would’ve put up numbers and
The pain of being a spectator watching dogshit basketball on my television instead of the basketball I enjoy which is played by guards like Allen Iverson and Kyrie Irving.
I don’t want to be an old man unwilling to move with the times, so I accept that nobody cares that I think the NBA sucks now. But it’s not just the NBA. Ever since math guys “figured out” that 3-pointers were efficient and therefore an <OPTIMIZED STRATEGY FOR ROBOTIC BASKETBALL ENJOYED BY EXCEL JUNKIES WITH ASTHMA AND A MASTERS DEGREE> the game has turned into total shit. Aside from how boring it is to watch teams take turns shooting 30% from behind the three-point line, it’s also missing the most important element that makes sports fun:
No. Swag.
Jumpshooting used to be a swaggy thing to do because your coach would yell at you before you even did it. Back when I was playing basketball, even though my coach asked me to shoot threes and made me practice threes all the time, he would still get all jumpy during the game. Coaches are usually older guys and they don’t like when cocky kids do risky things, especially if that risky thing goes against the grain of their personal relationship with Basketball Orthodoxy. There was nothing* like the thrill of pulling from five feet behind the line, hearing your coach yell your name in an angry voice, and then watching the place blow up and your coach change his tune when it caught net.
*[I presume it is more thrilling to dunk on someone, but that ain’t happening for me.]
Now coaches ask their players to shoot threes instead of any other kind of jumpshot. The problem is that it’s not swaggy to do what your coach says, and it’s never swaggy to “optimize” anything.
Antoine Walker captured the ethos best back in the day in a way that I think summarizes what gets lost in all sports when the math and efficiency get in the way of some good old fashioned chaos. When asked why he shot so many 3s, Antoine told the reporter “Because there are no 4s.” Athletes are weird. The game should be weird, too.