Crazy-Talk

I have to give the Bulls some credit: They have rebounded and notched two wins in a row. Granted, those wins came against Milwaukee and the New York Knicks—not exactly your upper echelon NBA franchises—but hey, wins are wins and the Bulls just increased their win total on the season by 22 percent.

What happens next is anyone’s guess. Will Ben Gordon be happy coming off the bench? Will they continue to play hard even if they go on another losing streak?

If the Bulls get it together enough to make the playoffs, there are sure to be people who will say the firing of Scott Skiles was justified and that the team is better off without him. But saying that misses the point. The point here is—and this won’t change with win streaks or playoff appearances—that this team of overpaid babies didn’t get their way and quit on their coach, which in turn got their coach fired on Christmas Eve. That’s a behavior trait, one that wins won’t alter.

The Bulls could go on to win it all, but that alone won’t change my perspective. What would change it is if the players collectively dedicated a winning season to Skiles, and issued a group statement saying they took responsibility for his firing, that they regretted acting like petulant adolescents who didn’t get to borrow the car, and called for him to be reinstated.

Skiles is gone for good, of course, but it would be a nice gesture. I’m not gonna hold my breath, though. It’d be more likely that Mayor Daley would start off the new year by taking responsibility for corruption in city hiring and in the police department, vow to throw the bums out, and then actually throw the bums out.

But that’s all just crazy-talk. The short days and lack of sunlight does strange things to my brain this time of year.

Happy New Year.

The Indignant Citizen

Bull $hit

“I hope your firings go really well.”
--Peter Gibbons, Office Space

So, the Bulls fired head coach Scott Skiles and the team responded by laying a collective cow patty on the gleaming wooden floor inside San Antonio’s AT&T Center. The Spurs led by double-digits the entire second half and were up by 25 at one point. Nice job, Bulls players. So, should they fire interim coach Pete Myers now, too? How about the whole coaching staff? Would that make you happy? Shit, why stop there, let’s let go the entire organization, except you players. You can run the joint however you see fit. You can play when you want, negotiate your own deals, sign your own paychecks … whatever.

Of course, if that actually happened, you petulant pissants would devolve into waterhead bickering after two games, tops. There’d be eight of you out there at a time, all fighting to play shooting guard and score 30. It would come to blows in short order … but hey, we might actually see some hustle then, so it wouldn’t be all bad.

Look, I’m picking on the Bulls, but they don’t deserve it any more than most other pro athletes. Eighty percent of them are prima donnas, in it for their own glorification and to ensure above all that somebody, in the words of Rasheed Wallace, "CTC." For those of you who don’t remember, Wallace used to play for the Portland Trail Blazers. Back in 2003, when trade rumors were dogging Wallace, he let down his anti-media interview guard long enough to deliver this gold-tooth nugget: “I don’t give a shit about no trade rumors. As long as somebody CTC at the end of the day, I’m with them. For all y’all that don’t know what ‘CTC’ means, that’s Cut The Check. I just go out there and play. Again, somebody just ‘CTC.’”

A little hothead hoopster philosophizing from the ‘Sheedster. So special. Anyway, by and large that’s the attitude in the NBA these days—hell, that's the attitude throughout pro sports for that matter. Apparently Luol Deng and Ben Gordon bitched to the Washington Wizards’ Gilbert Arenas about the way the Bulls negotiated with them. Arenas recounted the bitching in his blog. According to Jay Mariotti’s column in Wednesday’s Chicago Sun-Times (which we must take with a grain of salt, given that Mariotti is insane, but he does appear to quote Arenas’ blog, and we should assume that he can at least copy and paste accurately). Note the part where Arenas says, “I ended up finding out that with Deng, they didn’t even offer him $60 million. No, they didn’t even come close to that money.”

Well shit the bed and call me Shirley. Not even $60 million?! Damn, broutha, you gotta be a stone cold bitch to make a slap-in-the-face offer like “not even $60 million” to a bona-fide NBA player. How’s a hoopsta supposed to live on only $50 million? How is a dude supposed to provide for his family, put food on the goddam table, for chrissake? It’s a fucking INSULT! And so Deng quit. He didn’t actually quit as in walk-out-the-door quit, which would have been the principled thing to do. Nah, he stopped playing for his coach, stopped hustling. So did Gordon, who was also pissed off about only being offered something less than $75 million. Oh, the indignity. How can you face all your NBA buddies with only 10 Hummers to their 15?

But we were talking about quitting … and principles. Which leads us to Honor, although that appears to be a dead-end alley in the case of the Bulls. So these players, either upset because they’re not getting Paid what they think they’re worth or because they just don’t like their boss, stop working. And what happens? The boss gets fired. That would be Skiles. He gets fired on Christmas Eve. Not that I feel that bad for him, because he’s walking away with a cool $7 million and will certainly land a sweet job as a TV analyst or a college coach somewhere. It’s not like he had to take all the Christmas presents back in order to make the house payment.

But how backwards is that? Where’s the Honor in it? The players get pissy and quit and the coach gets fired. I mean, that’s messed up, right? And it happens over and over, and has been happening for years ... hell, for decades. In my world if I quit on my boss they’d issue 10 warnings and then escort me out after six months. My boss would keep her job and hire someone else for less money who’d work harder.

Here in the real world, that’s how it’d work, anyway. But as gets reinforced every day, pro sports isn’t the real world. It’s a fantasyland of bling and boorish behavior, a utopia for a country and a culture that believes in the absolute power of entertainment, in the overriding notion that status comes from wealth, and that wealth is given, not earned. Win the lottery. Make a jump shot. Hit a ball. Straight flush. Booya, baby.

It’s fucking disgusting. I hope you’re happy Bulls players. You epitomize everything that’s wrong with pro sports and our culture.

The Indignant Citizen