LukaTheGOAT wrote:sp6r=underrated wrote:RCM88x wrote:
My NBA interest is primarily driven by the Cavs being relevant. Lebron is a curiosity because of his place in history, not the driver. Sometimes those things have correlated quite closely.
However, I do think this brings up another unique element of NBA fandom that isn't as relevant in football. I've heard it called Superhero syndrome, where fans interest are primarily driven by one player, and once that player is no longer playing, their interest wanes. In an era where there is a unique lack of young, American elite players, I think this has hurt the NBA in acquiring new young fans. Especially in todays media landscape where everything has to be analyzed, ranked, compared, contrasted, criticized, etc... Rarely does mass media (if you can even call it that anymore) stop to appreciate the here and now. Not to say there was a lot of criticism of Jordan in his early years. But today, it's impossible for any young player to be talked about without comparisons to former guys (often by former guys). Just creates an atmosphere that isn't as accepting of new people.
There are no young American prospects that have ATG trajectory currently, ANT maybe the closest but that might just be due the vacuum that currently exists. That may not be a problem for the NBA as a whole, but it certainly is a problem for the average American sports fan.
Thanks for the response. And I think you're superhero point is important and I do think the NBA is more dependent on it than most sports leagues.
As an aside no athlete in my life ever got the coverage Jordan did. I'd argue that the scrutiny someone like Lebron received isn't so much the outlier as the utter free pass MJ did. It didn't make sense then. It doesn't make sense now. Him being a scumbag was almost treated as a compliment which I'll never understand.
Was MJ considered a scumbag? The whole "Be like Mike," campaign and the way his smile was emphasized, seemed to suggest MJ was just a generally swell guy. There were maybe the occasional horror stories that gained more steam later on. But as someone not alive for MJ's prime, that is the impression I got.
So, in terms of "scumbag", I'd be more inclined to use the term "obsessively competitive a**hole". Not really going to get into whether "scumbag" is literally an incorrect term, but what was the case was that people venerated Jordan for his ultra-competitiveness and so examples of him being inappropriately competitive (I remember a story of him cheating at boardgames while a guest at another family's Thanksgiving when he was in college, or something like that) let people to have a kind of "boys will be boys" attitude toward Jordan's anti-social behavior. "That's how you've got to be if you want to be the BEST!".
The fact that this existed in the same world where you had "Be like Mike" ads is telling about the media world as it existed back then. It was a time where there was still separation between what those near the game knew, and what advertisers could sell to families.
I would draw the analogy to Old Hollywood Stars in the pre-tabloid era, where the press basically worked for the studios because people bought glamour without seeming to have any resentment. Of course there were still scandals that could bring a star down, and thus there were proto-paparazzi, but the take-down engine wasn't the well-oiled machine it is today.
I would say that by the '80s, when Jordan was becoming a global french-fry-selling superstar, the paparazzi was pretty mature in general, but it wasn't focused on sports as much as it was focused on female celebrities. To this day famous men still don't get targeted like famous women of course, but it's getting closer.
