AUBURN HILLS – In our next lives, part of all of us would love to be Latrell Sprewell.
We want to be as good at what we do as he is and for it to come just as easily. We desire to be so indispensable to be entitled to act badly and put authority figures at greater risk than ourselves. We want to be so unconditionally loved we never have to offer more than token and calculated apologies, and so financially independent that ultimately we only have to answer to ourselves.
Sprewell blew off six days of camp. He consciously, uncaringly tooled across country while teammates did the worst drudge work of the season without having the courtesy to phone employers who pay him millions.
After a jury, charmed as an arena filled with basketball fans, chose to believe Sprewell was a guy who liked to go a little over the speed limit, not a potential killer with a death machine, he celebrated fooling ’em all again by taking a leisurely route to work for which he was already late.
By rule of thumb, Sprewell regularly puts one to his own nose. This time, it was aimed at the persons who rescued him in January from his self-induced hell. He either takes some secret delight in playing the thorn that always comes out smelling like the rose or simply was acting out another expression of the indifference that society often is too willing to tolerate as one of the quirks of genius.
The Garden fans seem to love the anti-hero all the more for his tardiness. Considering that the one thing that seems to most drive Sprewell is their energy, we suspect the victory lap he took and the paid newspaper thanks he offered last June were calculated toward the CBA maximum $61.87 million over five years.
Managements show how much they care to the fans by sending millions to marquee players, never mind whatever negative societal messages share space in the envelope the star may have pushed. Therefore, as business goes, we can’t say the Knicks will live to regret marrying Sprewell for up to six years. Whatever performance they get out of him, for however long, will feed the Garden beasts who pull the wagon.
The Knicks can trade Sprewell, may even be continuing to try. If the worst happens and he does something to turn the fans against him, a team of means like the Knicks can usually justify its ways by swallowing any potential financial loss in one gulp.
Sprewell was an asset that had to be protected or lost for nothing come June. We would assume that the blank check he was written – name your fee, Spree – was an attempt to psychologically manipulate the contrarian small forward into taking the shorter, smaller deal that surely would have been rejected as a first offer.
If that was the strategy, it was a good one, until it didn’t work. Sprewell took the long deal he says gives him injury security that lets him sleep, leaving Dave Checketts, Scott Layden and Jeff Van Gundy to toss and turn, married by shotgun to a bride who tried to strangle a former lover.
Best of luck to the newlyweds, all of whom now lie in a bed of their own making. Sprewell merely tolerates the just-extended coach, who preaches commitment daily and now has to say he has no problem with a guy who blew off camp. Meanwhile, Van Gundy’s bread is buttered by someone who could turn away from his instructions at any time, leaving any coach curious how much support he will get if push comes to strangulation or one of the insubordinate stages, blatant or subtle, in between.
The fine that Checketts laid on Sprewell last April for comments made by his blowhard agent, Robert Gist, went back into the player’s pocket via his shoe company and now has been rescinded besides. Gist continues to dispense advice in employee relations to the Knicks whenever reporters call. The $25,000 sure made he and Spree think twice, didn’t it?
We cannot conceive of the Knicks going ahead comfortably with a star who disregarded a contractual obligation to show up at training camp, who thought he was so far above his teammates that they could do the two-a-days without him. We shudder at the message the virtual blank check sends to a player who has never shown any deep regret for any of the bad positions – like traction – he has put persons in.
We think it’s the sickest reflection of the spiraling lack of conscience in the retailing and, specifically, shoe industry, that this self-described “worst nightmare” represents himself as a manifestation of The American Dream.
The Knicks could have just said “no,” for ethical, basketball and common-sense reasons, but they proved themselves to be just another bozo on the bus by making a business decision. Sprewell will keep the Garden full, the network lucrative, the championship dream alive.
You can assign a value on that, above – more like below – the basic ones by which we’ve been taught to live our lives. But professional sports, with a history of excusing the inexcusable, has rarely looked so pandering and pathetic.
