Welcome back sports fans (or fair warning for the non-fan) to another step in the process with Lucas Koski and me. This one is becoming stale fast so get in in your oven asap. We discuss Michael Vick, injuries, and the obvious frustrations of oblong balls.
Hello nearest and dearest. It feels so great to be back with a new show. Tune in and listen to me and my first guest Lucas Koski discussing pressing issues like dating rituals, alcoholism, and Herbert Hoover. Also, I would like to offer the warmest appreciation for my new audio specialist Patrick Blomquist. I think you are going to like him.
In this short preliminary podcast The Dave Good Show covers personal responsibility, activism, selling out, and why he roots for losing teams. All discussions of relationships have been removed due to extreme controversy. Dave Good strongly recommends that you tune in and get tuned up.
Click here to listen: Episode 1
Podcasts of the Dave Good Show will be available to download on iTunes shortly. All featured music by Strength.
I can think of at least one major negative, even devastating, everyday reality for a teenage basketball prodigy. When you are a prodigy, people will attempt to put their dreams inside of you. Every person a generation ahead thinks,“If only I could combine my experience with your god given gifts. We could really make a difference.” They tell you how you should play and how you should be. “Support this charity, Lebron.” “Care only about winning, Lebron.” “Don’t make mistakes X, Y, and Z like I did.” Most of all, they insist that they truly love the real you. It doesn’t take a college education to intuit that really, they don’t.
(Former) Cleveland Cavaliers basketball star LeBron James scrapes paint from a window in the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans on Feb. 15, 2008. NBA players in town for the All-Star Game took a day to work on community service projects to help with the recovery from Hurricane Katrina. (Bill Haber/Associated Press)
It’s not that the people (coaches, mentors, employers, public) don’t love you at all but the love they offer is totally conditional. They love you only if you become that person they want you to be. They love you only if you take on their dreams as your own. As any fan of Inception can tell you, this is impossible. Transferring dreams is like blowing smoke into a soap bubble. A love-starved prodigy will do whatever it takes to accommodate. He will walk it and talk it as best he can. He will constantly repeat words that reflect a coach’s or mentor’s life experience rather than his own. He will try to accommodate the dreams of an entire city, but inside his true self will long to fulfill the teenage dreams he has always been told to ignore. Every time he passes up an opportunity to get drunk or stupid in favor of cutting the ribbon at a youth center the rage will steadily begin to grow.
From the moment he changed from boy to adolescent, Lebron struggled to be the “man” Cleveland wanted him to be. None of us can imagine the pressure of being “chosen” to save a dying city. It is cruel to force someone into the role of messiah. There is no way that a 13-year-old Lebron chose to take on a challenge that the civic leadership was clearly failing to overcome. How could a 16-year-old Lebron know what was happening to him? How could 21-year-old Lebron explain he wasn’t basketball Jesus? Even if he did, (perhaps he tried) no one would have listened. He was now the living breathing embodiment of deeply held hopes and aspirations. They just kept blowing smoke and the walls of the bubble got thinner and thinner.
Lebron James Parties it up in D.C.
Eventually, the real Lebron could no longer take it. He had to end the charade. More than that, he needed to express his anger. He isn’t a messiah or a man-child. He is a 25-year-old kid that wants to get laid and party. He doesn’t have much in the way of genuine life experience. Maybe after he makes a few mistakes (he has gotten a good start) he can earn enough character to make a real difference in this world. Uplifting the industrial Midwest is not a realistic goal for an barely grown athlete. He has another 50 years to make his mark and define his legacy. Real sustainable social/cultural changes takes at least that long and it sure as hell has to come from the heart. Anyone can give $100k to charity, but it takes a real man to make sure that charity does permanent good. The only way Lebron could get Cleveland to understand was through a rude and childish act of passive aggression (the bubble had to burst). When you have been crowded into a corner of fake philanthropy perhaps the only way out is a spit filled fuck you. He is a kid and he doesn’t know shit… but he has to learn that on his own. Shallowness is his god given right. For greatness to be real, it must come from within.
I was lying on my couch absorbing the latest Chuck Klosterman book “Eating the Dinosaur” when I came across a word pairing, a term, that satisfied a desperate intellectual need. The pairing? “Post-Taste.” After reading these two words I realized that one of my favorite drunken monologues had just been rendered obsolete. I have been living in a post-taste world for years and I just didn’t know how to say it.
I used to express post-taste to whoever was buzzed and in my booth like this, “I don’t care what you like, I care why you like what you like. It doesn’t matter what you are watching and listening too. It matters what you are getting out of it.” Hopefully after I uttered these words, at least one of my hipster companions started contemplating their ipod play list and ironic t-shirt in new and profound ways. Post-taste is a philosophy of the future.
A post-taste attitude will set America free. We can all just like what we like and let go of the concern that what we like could secretly and unknowingly define us as totally and utterly lame. Disney movies? I think they mostly suck but maybe you have brilliant impressions about the cartoon’s ability to exploit the universal anxieties surrounding a mother’s mortality. Baseball? I have trouble getting behind fat smokers that call themselves athletes, but maybe you are tired of all the glory being bestowed on the muscled winners of the genetic lottery. In a post-taste world you never have to write someone off because of their media choices. You could even authentically continue a date after she mentions her favorite song to make out to is “Crash” by Dave Matthews. Our “taste” is very different than our “soul.”
However… to be completely honest… the opportunity to identify with those who embrace the Elvis to my Beatles was not what lead me to the post-taste epiphany. It was really the opposite. There is nothing worse that hearing someone spout off about loving something for the wrong reasons… nothing worse than someone loving what you love because of ideas that you hate. Post-taste gives us all the freedom to dislike the other people at the concert/movie/ art opening. Yes I too love Joe vs. The Volcano… but that doesn’t mean you aren’t a gigantic douche. Our lines of connection are deeper the patterns of our consumption.
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I hope you love me for all the right reasons.
The Decision
Like most American sports fans I have spent the past 48 hrs. reading every possible article about the potential home of Lebron James. As usual The Sports Guy Bill Simmons put it best. Would he go to Chicago and join the best possible team, or to New York for the best possible market, or stay in Cleveland and be the best possible person. His choice? Miami… the best possible nightlife.
The Miami choice caused the entire country to turn on him. He hurt his hometown by leaving and he hurt the rest of us by making a decision that had nothing to do with what was good for the game. Ultimately his decision was extremely childish and cruel. I spent hours reading commentary looking for a silver lining around a persona that is now a dark cloud of selfishness. How am I supposed to not be a hater when everything about King James and the ESPN publicity roll out was so incredibly painful and nauseating? The answer of course comes from a deep place of empathy.
LeBron James arrives in Miami (Photo by Gustavo Caballero/Getty Images)
From the age of 13 on… James was a man-child destined to save his city. Can you imagine? He has been fielding questions and making decisions about his legacy when in spite of his body he was only a boy. Lebron is going to Miami to reclaim his childhood. He is going to Miami to be famous, sexy, young, and stupid. He deserves it. No child should be expected to execute the unlikely rebirth of one of America’s dying cities. No adolescent should be expected to care about winning as many titles as Michael Jordan. He tried to take on the aspirations of a nation as his own, but he failed. Just like you or me or anyone would drown in a sea of ludicrous expectation. Have fun in south beach Lebron. The fans suck, the politics are corrupt and loathsome, the values are malleable and transient. Seems like a great place to embrace the childhood that never was.
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