Gil's American Arenas
Gilbert Arenas makes me sad. As a teenager, I loved the way he played; high-scoring, skill-first, bodacious. I’ll always remember when he got into an unnecessary feud with Duke head coach Mike Krzyzewski. After being left off Team USA by Krzyzewski, Arenas warred against the Duke diaspora throughout the NBA season, and spoke ill of Coach K every chance he got. “If I have the chance to go back to college,” he wrote decades ago, in a blog, “I'll give up one NBA season to play against Duke. 40-minute game at Duke… they got soft rims… I'd probably score 84 or 85. I wouldn't pass the ball. I wouldn't even think about passing it. It would be like a NBA Live or an NBA 2K7 game, you just shoot with one person.”
This was a hilarious thing for a sixth-year professional to say, and all the more so because he seemed to deeply mean it. Arenas could not keep his id from the cockpit of his brain, and as I struggled through my puberty years, I related fiercely to his battle to be someone bigger than he really was. Arenas was already close to the end of his peak when he launched his anti-Duke offensive, though, and the fall from there would be precipitous. First injuries, and then an infamous gun-in-the-locker-room incident bombed his career; in 2009, he and Washington Wizards teammate Javaris Crittenton reportedly drew on each other, during an escalating argument about gambling debts. It was Christmas Eve.
The good NBA years lasted just a little more than half of Arenas’ decade in the league. The Orlando Magic and Memphis Grizzlies took brief shots at reviving him as a sixth man, but he was out just after his 30th birthday, and only ever played one more season of basketball elsewhere, for the Shanghai Sharks.
Arenas has since done something that many players fail at, however, by successfully reinventing himself in the media sphere. He’s got stories to tell, and does so generously and with plenty of energy. It’s an odd thing, but a lot of players—former and current—can seem at times like media is more important to them than playing, even though the latter pays significantly better, and is a far more conventional path to glory. But in the 21st century, multi-billionaires are willing to risk it all just to say what they really think, online, for all to see. Arenas, like those goofs who run the world, has always sought thrill in the pushing of professional and confessional boundaries, through both chapters of his career.
So it was hardly a shock when, last week, Arenas was arrested for hosting illegal poker games. These were high-production affairs. Chefs, valets, security guards, waitresses, and masseuses were hired to make Arenas’ California home feel like an exclusive Las Vegas casino. As the battery of advertisements on your phone and computer remind you, gambling is legal in most parts of America today, but Arenas—whose current podcast, “Gil’s Arena,” is sponsored by a fantasy outfit called Underdog Sports—provided a form of it that still lives well beyond the margins of the law.
It’s not his first episode of legal issues. There was the gun in the locker room, and then there was an arrest for possession of illegal fireworks, back in 2013. Like gambling, fireworks are hardly the greatest sin, and having them is a grey area, state by American state. But as you probably already guessed, Arenas wasn’t modest about his supply: he was reported to have at least twenty boxes full, in the back of his truck, which he drove 80 miles per hour down the highway. An LAPD bomb squad was called in to safely remove the haul of amusing explosives.
More than any of this high-stakes foolishness, though, it’s Arenas’ presence in the modern media landscape that makes me sad. A constant hose of hot takes, he degrades already low chances at collective thoughtfulness with most of his dispatches. An ugly peddler of the “America First” basketball paradigm, he plays into the biases of bottom-tier fans, and profits from them. His opposition to other nationalities isn’t the end of his sport-limiting mania, though. He’s also quick to slander Americans who don’t happen to play in the same individualistic style that he once thrilled 15-year-old me with, going so far as calling Tim Duncan a “fill-in player,” simply because he wasn’t an entertainingly over-dribbling jump shooter.
Arenas is 43 years old, and the things he says and does are still for an adolescent audience. He’s privileged enough to shimmy out of his new problems in court, and will continue to do well in a culture that doesn’t exactly reward you for maturity or nuance. His story is hardly the cautionary parable that Stephen A. Smith makes it out to be, in recent admonishments of Arenas. More accurately, it’s the same kind of national mirror seen in the final season of HBO’s spectacular, pitch-black comedy, “Eastbound and Down,” about a washed up former MLB pitcher named Kenny Powers, who finally finds his post-career grounding as a garbage huckster on an ESPN-like sports network. Powers’ longer odyssey on the show is one of immoral mess, redeemed by a society that’s always willing to entertain someone who’s entertaining, no matter what they may do wrong. Gilbert Arenas knows that this is exactly where he lives.