Dame, ACU, sports, glory (TLC, 1)
Two years ago I wrote the following in a short tweet thread, in response to Damian Lillard's walk-off buzzer-beater to win Portland's playoff series against Oklahoma City:
What's revealed by Dame's buzzer-beater walk-off series-winner, and the hoopla surrounding it since, is something simple but often forgotten in today's analytics-driven journalism: People do not watch or play sports for the sake of technical proficiency. They do so for glory.
What Damian Lillard did was all-caps GLORIOUS. The stakes, the moment, the narrative, the beef with Russ, the degree of difficulty: People watch what is often sheer monotony in sports for a single, once-in-a-lifetime moment just like that.
Paul George's comments after the game that "it was a bad shot, though nobody's going to say it," was true but seriously beside the point. Of course it was a bad shot! If by "bad" we mean "having a low probability of going in," it was definitionally bad. And yet it went in!
Watch the video, and look at the reactions: OKC's, the crowd's, Dame's teammates, and Dame's own. Sheer, stupefying, lightning-struck glory. Athletes devote the entirety of their lives, soul and body, to be ready for a moment like that—and not, say, to finish 4th in MVP voting.
Sports journalism's in a weird place, drawn in a few directions: hyper-analytics; First Take stupidity; Twitter cleverness; athletes-as-celebrities gossip. What I'd love more than anything is a recognition of what makes sports great, and matching prose to the glory of the thing.
I stand by all of that. Every day that analytics makes further inroads not just on backroom GM decision-making but on the whole public culture of professional (and amateur!) sports is a step in the wrong direction. Sports do not exist for "wins," Ringz, or championships. They certainly do not exist for statistical supremacy. They do not even exist first of all for the display of physical excellence and bodily self-mastery and the combat of competition. They exist for people to behold unpredictable epiphanies of human glory. All the other goods of sports are contained therein.
Which brings me to ACU, where I teach. My colleague Richard Beck wrote up a nice appreciation of our "little ol'" basketball team's dethroning—decapitating? horns-sawing?—of the University of Texas in the NCAA tournament. Watching our team upset UT in the opening round, by icing two free throws to go up by one point before stealing the inbound pass as time expired, put me in mind of Dame's walk-off buzzer-beater. Sheer pandemonium, wild release, pure glory: the reason why we do this in the first place. That glory spread like wildfire across sports media and social media alike, and rightly so. How often in your life will you see something like that?
It would have been wonderful for our guys to have won the next game (and the next, and the next...). But that loss doesn't remotely diminish the glory of the initial upset. It happened, it always will have happened, and those players will be the toast of west Texas for a long time to come. Good for them.
