Let Us Now Praise Giant Men | Jalen Brunson Broke His Hand
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Let Us Now Praise Giant Men is a basketball column by Liam Baranauskas. This edition is about bad restaurant jobs, a brutal fairy tale, and the New York Knicks’ injuries.
Is 130 better or worse than 120? I mean, 130 is obviously more than 120, but is it prettier, more dynamic, more appealing—better? What about 104? 73? 200? Which number is best?
Each year around the time of the All-Star Game, an idea coalesces that there’s too much scoring in the NBA—essentially, that basketball has too much basketball in it. The argument goes that the past decade’s evolution of offensive strategy (particularly the devaluation of shots from the post and midrange, along with the development of seven-footers with the skill sets of non-giants) is, for some reason, bad. This perspective often dovetails with complaints that no one plays defense anymore (fairly absurd, as the quick-twitch choreography of most switch-everything defensive possessions is exhausting to even watch) and sometimes that no longer allowing players to grab and twist each other’s junk as a rebounding strategy has made the game soft.
Like most grumpy complaints that things aren’t as good as they once were, this is an essentially conservative position—not so much politically (though it’s often that, too!), but because it’s saying that things were better in unspecified better days, a time that probably more or less coincides with the terrible years of the complainer’s worst acne. Because it stems from foundational memory, it’s easy to mistake this arbitrary solipsism for intuitive fact. You probably think this way about something, even if it’s not basketball—food, music, fashion, whatever. There’s a correct way for things to be, because they were like that when they became solid enough to hang on to amid the fast-running waters threatening to wash you away.
A friend of mine once told me that, as a kid, she thought different digits had different personalities. Seven was a “cool guy.” Three was kind of shy. Four was a really pretty girl. Watch out for Nine! Don’t get on his bad side!
This seems just as reasonable as thinking that numbers these days are just too big.
Would you rather hang out with 133 and 127 or 94 and 86?
In The Uses of Enchantment, Bruno Bettelheim claims that being told fairy tales is a key part of children’s psychological development. The idea is that these stories’ frequent, egregious illogic traces, through the less-formed pathways of kids’ minds, feelings that they haven’t yet developed enough social context to process. So, for example, when a genie says he’s going to kill the fisherman who found his lamp for the crime of releasing him (in The Arabian Nights), a child empathizes with the nominal villain’s free-floating rage, as it mirrors their own shifting feelings about guilt, consequences, ego, and righteousness.
Bettelheim leans really heavily on the Freudian (boy oh boy does he love to talk Oedipal complexes!), and some of his conclusions are dubiously far-reaching (in one bizarre footnote, he ascribes a case subject’s schizophrenia to a shitty version of Cinderella that her father told her when she was a girl), but he’s also advancing an appealing and intuitive argument about the collective unconscious. As fairy tales developed organically, forged from telling and retelling for centuries before they were set to the page, their collective authorship (and their curation by agenda-less children who just want to hear a good story) supposes a common—if not universal—emotional architecture. Together, we wear down all of our cumulative anger and fear and joy until it becomes a perfect pearl.
I’ve been reading my college classes the Brothers Grimm version of “Rumpelstiltskin” at the beginning of the semester (it’s pedagogically justified! I don’t feel like explaining it!), and I’ve discovered that at the predominantly white, expensive private university where I teach, about half of the students don’t know the story at all. Straw into gold, bargaining for the miller’s daughter’s firstborn, guessing an impossible name—all of it might as well be something I’m making up on the spot. This seems like a huge shift. I can’t remember the first time I heard Rumpelstiltskin, or Jack and the Beanstalk, or Hansel and Gretel, but I knew so many different versions of these and other fairy tales that I don’t think I ever considered any version of them definitive. I doubt this was a product of my particular upbringing, either; aside from the odd cassette-and-book set, I don’t remember having any editions of these stories and I wasn’t read them aloud. Instead, fairy tales, even the ones that hadn’t been made into Disney movies, hummed in the background, presuppositions that grounded jokes in Mad magazine Super Specials and episodes of Looney Tunes. They were like air—always present, always known.
But if there’s any truth to my (admittedly anecdotal) evidence, it seems the now-archaic era of mass media that I grew up in may have been the beginning of the end of a long, long era of relevance for these stories. At their heart, they’re meant to foster connection between a single listener and a single teller, who commune with something mysterious that builds between them. I don’t know what this something is, but I’m pretty sure it resists aggregation, if not the mediation of technology altogether, and I’m also pretty sure it’s important.
Djuna Barnes wrote that children know something about fairy tales that they can’t tell. This is the stories’ value, even (especially?) if that knowledge is freely accessible to anyone. The knowledge isn’t important. It’s the secret.
A weird thing happened after this year’s annual complaints about the All-Star Game’s uncompetitiveness and general scoring inflation: basketball scores started to go down. Some nerds figured out that it was probably because fewer fouls are being called (most likely from an unannounced league mandate), and while it hasn’t made a huge quantitative difference—a couple points per game, along with the occasional resurfacing of the 1990s-style rock fight where both teams score below 100—so far in the playoffs, it’s mattered to how games feel. In winning their series with Denver, Minnesota spat out an endless procession of gangly, anonymous dudes in headbands at the Nuggets’ Jamal Murray, turning a potentially beautiful matchup of grace and skill into something resembling the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game. Luka Dončić has spent the entire playoffs in a continuous jig of outrage, his Claymation face contorted with entitled, mock-surprised anger at missed calls, as if all the world’s ills have been dumped into his jockstrap and they’re really cold. Indiana coach Rick Carlisle sent the league a letter detailing seventy-eight missed calls over two games in the Pacers’ series with the Knicks, which almost definitely didn’t make him look like a little bitch.
If this environment of low-key bickering, tattling about minutiae, and endless, repetitive labor sounds like your job, then it makes sense that, over the past few weeks, the Knicks became deeply sympathetic protagonists. In the same way that most people try to be good employees when they go to work despite all that discourages them from doing so, the Knicks played against the Knicks as much as they did their opponents. Injuries are, of course, a part of sports, but because coach Tom Thibodeau plays his best players until they die, the Knicks were, throughout their series with Indiana, basically bandages wrapped around other bandages with some dust in the middle. With the team down multiple key players, Jalen Brunson (who, in the best of health, drives to the hoop with the grace of a photocopier being pushed down a flight of stairs) was forced to carry the team’s scoring load while only having one working leg. Josh Hart played just about every possible minute in the series, and Thibodeau may have secretly loaned him to Cleveland so he could put on a Marcus Morris mask and play a little more there. At one point, Thibodeau apparently hired out from a temp agency—no one’s sure whether it’s Trey Burke, Trey Lyles, or Alec Burks who was running at the three, but he went for twenty-six points in game seven.
But here’s the thing: even as watching the Knicks against themselves made them the most fun and strangely likable team in the playoffs, their story had an icky undercurrent. Basketball players aren’t exactly exploited workers (Hart, to his great credit, etched his legend into permanence by explicitly pointing out this fact), but in succeeding through the merits of employees’ overachievements despite their superiors’ mismanagement, the Knicks organization signified a conservative basketball fan’s wet dream: the team played with an unquestioning adherence to hierarchy and performative, masochistic overwork. Add in the fact that their success came in part from playing rough on the boards and on defense amid looser referees’ whistles and their story shifts a bit, with a note of Internet-era, game theory–addled, “you’re doing it wrong!” optimization darkening their success. Two things can be true at once: from one angle, the Knicks were hardworking underdogs; from another, they were small-time entrepreneurs hoping to squeeze a little more juice from the drop-shipping scam before the bottom drops out.
Since I don’t want my six-year-old son to be schizophrenic, I decided to read him “The Robber Bridegroom.”
Now, even by the gory standards of unsanitized folktales, “The Robber Bridegroom” is an absolute bloodbath. There’s a dark forest and a dark house and cannibalism and a sexualized murder in which a captured girl is made to get drunk (the Brothers Grimm, those moralizing perverts, write that this “caused her heart to break”), and is stripped naked before being dismembered. The story turns when the hero-bride produces the murdered girl’s serendipitously acquired finger with a ring on it, proving that her fiancé intends to kill her, too.
It’s also a story full of evocative magic, taking place in a universe polarized by good and by beauty, counteracting the consciously chosen evil of cruel men. There’s a bird who warns the bride to turn back, a morally ambiguous old woman trapped in the dark house’s cellar who tells her how to escape. Scattered seeds bloom in the dusk on a trail of ashes, allowing the bride to find her way home in the moonlight.
My son was frightened of the story but also loved it. This makes sense—lots of stuff when you’re a little kid (and even when you’re an adult!) is simultaneously attractive and repulsive. This is Djuna Barnes’s secret knowledge, what you know that you can’t tell. In “The Robber Bridegroom,” fear and wonder are symbiotic, two states that are distinct but mutually dependent. It’s a Ferris wheel of a story, requiring bravery to get to the good stuff. I don’t know if that’s what my son likes about it, but now he asks me to read him a story that’s “a little scary but also a little bit funny” while he plays Legos.
Whether the actual scores of basketball games are slightly higher or slightly lower than usual is, obviously, unimportant. It doesn’t even matter to the games themselves, which are defined only by the relation between scores, not their collective magnitude, and it certainly doesn’t matter to our world at large. It’s only in the long arc of seasons and the longer one of the lifetimes of people watching, that those numbers, improbably, take on narratives. That’s on us, the people watching. We give those numbers personalities. We guess their true names.
Rooting interest, once you get beyond loyalties stemming from birth or geography, is about assigning good moral qualities to one team and bad ones to another. This process usually means translating athletic transcendence into virtue, while overemphasizing the mechanics of front-office bureaucracy to create villains. The most illustrative example comes when the mid-2010s Warriors took a rich-get-richer heel turn, signing Kevin Durant and erasing the good will generated by Steph Curry’s court-and-consciousness expanding moonballs.
The Knicks’ contradiction was that their organizational repulsiveness—from the owner, who’s an unctuous combination of your childhood friend’s asshole dad and an insane, syphilitic king; to their tyrannical, control-freak coach; to their unearned “Mecca of Basketball” pretension—should have made them villains. Instead, the players transcended these obnoxious elements even as they were defined by them, like some put-upon back-of-house staff building lifelong friendships as they churn out dishes for an abusive head chef. I just hope that when their shift ended, Donte DiVincenzo and Isaiah Hartenstein went out by an MSG dumpster to smoke a joint together.
It was anticlimactic when Jalen Brunson broke his hand in game seven of the Knicks’ series with Indiana. He didn’t crumble in pain or dramatically airball a shot while grimacing. It seemed to happen off-screen—the broadcast didn’t make a big deal of Brunson subbing out or going to the locker room. It wasn’t even his first mysterious injury of the series—in game two, he left the game for a quarter after being kneed in the balls, returning after being diagnosed, nonsensically, with a foot injury. Cumulatively, it seemed the Knicks’ players’ bodies were dissolving. Josh Hart had spent most of game six calmly massaging his abdomen, victim of some weird internal malady that made it seem within the realms of possibility that a hole in his skin might tear like the seam of a pair of cheap slacks, letting his intestines pour out of the bottom of his jersey and onto the hardwood. OG Anunoby hit a couple of shots in the first couple of minutes of the first quarter of game seven, realized he couldn’t move his legs anymore, and left the game to go have them amputated.
One of the strange things in “The Robber Bridegroom” is that the hero-bride, the murdered girl, and the old woman are, in some sense, all the same person. This seems the key to the story’s secret knowledge, an impossibility that has to be, the personalities of numbers transcending their values. We all live in the same cruel and beautiful world, and so we all create it, one in which every possible ending to the story—life, death, and pitiful, endless endurance—exists simultaneously.
As time ran out on the Knicks’ 130–109 loss to Indiana, the game’s announcers began lamenting the number of injuries the Knicks were dealing with, as if this weren’t a direct and inevitable result of the team’s identity. The machine the players fed their eccentricities and contradictions into ended up destroying them.
Would you rather hang out with 109 than 130? Which is better?
Can you win a basketball game while scoring fewer points than your opponents?
Liam Baranauskas is a writer from Philadelphia.
Illustration: Arunas Kacinskas.
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