A Basketball Fairy Tale in Middle America (NY Times article)

BigBenito · Nov 8, 2012

N.B.A. scoring champions are, as a rule, weirdos and reprobates and in some cases diagnosable sociopaths. Something about dominating your opponent, publicly, more or less every day of your life, in the most visible aspect of your sport, tends to either warp your spirit or to be possible only to those whose spirits are already warped. Michael Jordan, when he wasn’t busy scoring, was busy punching a teammate in the face and gambling away small fortunes. Allen Iverson, in his spare time, recorded an aesthetically and morally terrible rap album and gave an iconic speech denigrating the very notion of practice. Kobe Bryant is and shall forever be Kobe Bryant. Wilt, Shaq, Pistol Pete, Dominique, McGrady, McAdoo, Rick Barry — it’s a near-solid roster of dysfunction: sadists, narcissists, malcontents, knuckleheads, misanthropes, womanizers, addicts and villains. While it’s true that plain old N.B.A. superstars do occasionally manage to be model citizens (cf. Tim Duncan, Grant Hill, Steve Nash), there is something irredeemable about a scoring champion.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/11/m...ty-thunders-fairy-tale-rise.html?ref=magazine

Nice article/interview on KD/OKC/Thunder - it is long, but muy bueno.

and "(The mayor of Oklahoma City told me that he thinks Oklahomans are humble because of their proximity to Texans, who will never stop bragging about anything.)"

Pages 10 & 11 have Harden information.

And now it is time to talk about James Harden’s beard.

The fate of Harden was the first serious test of the Thunder’s utopian culture — the first stubborn wrinkle in Sam Presti’s enlightened basketball collective
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A Basketball Fairy Tale in Middle America (NY Times article)

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