Two Sporting Items
Firstly, the matter of Sir Charles. Bethlehem got me thinking with his latest Sporting News column. Regarding Charles Barkley’s ascendance, Shoals writes:
Barkley could get away with anything because he made no bones about who he was. He wasn’t a lightweight rebel like Rodman, or the kind of surly bad boy who would soon invade the NBA in droves. Barkley was an antihero, who, in both his impulsiveness and authenticity, made the rest of the world look like hypocrites.
But what kind of antihero is he. Despite his amorality, Barkley is no noir detective. He doesn’t have the casual disregard for the suffering of others. His amorality is born not so much of selfishness but more of an active disdain for morality itself. “I am not a role model,” is not merely Charles’ abdication from the crown of moral rectitude, but an active refutation of the right of others to bear that crown. At the same time, Charles’ world is not the fragmented nightmare or amoral wasteland of the antihero, but the ordered and fundamentally ridiculous world of spectacle. The universe of Celebrity he inhabits is analogous to the circus of the Renaissance court — larger than life figures defined by their hollowness and hypocrisy. It is not the “rest of the world” as Shoals suggests whom Barkley shames. It is the shallow and ultimately non-real ghosts of Celebrity around him.
He is stubbornly, manifestly real.
The antiheroic character perhaps most analogous to this Barkley is Shakespeare’s Falstaff. Ultimately a tragic figure, Falstaff nonetheless is the most sympathetic of Shakespeare’s fools and was his most enduringly popular — his appearance in the Merry Wives of Windsor (and indeed, some scholars suggest, the very play itself) owes to popular or even royal demand (it has been postulated that Queen Elizabeth herself requested an encore for the buffoon). His role, and the role of most of Shakespeare’s fools, is to speak for the underlings — the poor people in the “cheap seats” — in criticizing the nobility and their exploits. Just as Barkley, despite his foolishness, consistently makes others look foolish (especially “stuffed shirts”) Falstaff parries the verbal rapier thrusts of Henry IV‘s nobles with drunken and misleadingly clumsy ease. One wonders, just as when one watches Barkley (or another master of the form, Dean Martin) how much of his buffoonery is show, and how much his “true nature”.
I suspect in the end that Barkley may surprise us all with his savvy.
Secondly, the matter of Boom Tho. Rod Benson is a basketball player in the NBA’s Development League (basically the minors for Basketball). Nobody would know who he was outside of North Dakota except someone gave him a blog and he got famous. This is the kind of thing he got famous for doing:
In this, I encourage you to find your own meaning.