players of the game

More on the ever stranger Kwame Brown saga, courtesy of On & On's first guest commentator, the good doctor himself, FL:

What Scoop doesn't really talk about is how not only did Kwame's pops beat up on him and his siblings, but the cat is also in prison for life for murder. I think a few of his other siblings are also in jail. And Basketball quite literally saved Kwame from the fate of his father and brothers. I think I read somewhere that he grew big enough to be great in Basketball and stand up to his father at about the same time, but his father's conviction saved him from ever having to really exercise that size. But nothing kept him from playing ball...that is until he got to the Wizards.

Unlike KG and Amare who had started trotting across the country as high school ballers, Kwame was pretty much a local kid from some podunk Georgia town. He only had one male rolemodel, his basketball coach of course, and who of course told him to turn pro. Then boom, he's landed into the hands of Michael Jordan, Charles Oakley and Jahidi White. There's a story about how during one particular workout during his rookie year White, who weighs about 3bills, sat on him. Coaching these mild-mannered gentlemen was none other than Doug Collins. And to just make it more fun, the year after they drafted Brown, they traded Rip Hamilton for the "tougher" Jerry Stackhouse, who would later admit he had no idea what he was doing on that team since he and Jordan essentially played the same position and had similar styles of play.

Scoop knows for damn well that the issue with Kwame Brown is not whether or not he is gay. What Jordan did to the kid was mess his head up and have a 19 year old fighting two dudes twice his age, while another goon, thinking this kid was going to take his job, joined in the fun. Essentially Jordan brought him back to the same environment that he thought he had escaped when he started playing basketball. Now you can charge a parent with Child-abuse, and you can charge an employer with all forms of harassment, but somehow in pro-sports (unless you're the dude who just sued Bill Romanowski) you can not say anything when Jahidi White throws you down while you're going for a dunk, proceeds to sit on you, and your bossess and teammates look the other way. Then to add insult to injury, they trade your good friend because he was not "tough enough." Interestingly enough this was the same logic that John Wesbrod recently used split up Mobley and Francis. Now I can understand Jordan bringing Stackhouse in to make his team tougher, but Doug Christie?

Of course having Jermaine O'Neal going on TV and saying that all a person needs to do is hit the gym and get their game up to solve all their ills in the NBA also does not help the matter here.

Jordan and his cronies in DC were a step above homophobic. Dudes in the locker room who walk around calling people "faggots" are homophobic. But what Jordan did was create an environment where what outside the lines could have been prosecuted as hate crimes could exist and thrive. The definition of the "flaming faggot" that Jordan, White, Oakley and Collins turned Brown into was definitely not what he could have thought it to be when he first got to DC, because it was not himself. Jordan and his cronies oversaw an anarchy of identity. Fostering a social-situation where punishment eventually overcame any desires for discipline forced Kwame Brown to revert from man-child, to child-man, and made the basketball court the place that he never intended it to be, the ring in which he had to fight his father. They turned the court into his prison.

Of course, I am riffing off of Foucault at the end and one can make an argument (if someone hasn't already done it) that the sporting arena is like the Foucaultian prison in terms of how it attempts to discipline masculine identities. But alas none of that will solve Kwame Brown's problems. For Kwame will land with the either the Hawks or the Magic next year. He will goof around with either Josh Smith or Dwight Howard, while catching alley-oops and smiling on the court. He will then give it to Etan Thomas or Antawn Jamison something awful the first time they meet.

Or he could end up like Leon and Dontonio trying to find his game and his self...I think there's still enough hope for the former to occur.

Nah'mean.