Basketball

After the game, NBA players give one another man-hugs the tv cameras feast on. They share private little conversations of mutual love and respect.

Another disturbing trend is the habit teammates now have of giving a player a fist-bump who has missed--not made--a free throw. What's up with that? The guy missed a shot he is supposed to make.

In the old days, rival players detested one another. Wilt Chamberlain never gave Bill Russell a man-hug, nor did Jerry West put his arm around Oscar Robertson. You were expected to make your free throws. If you lost a close game you didn't meet the other team at half-court and hug one another; you walked as quickly as you could to the locker room where you could put your fist through a wooden door and take a cold shower.

Doug Collins, coach of the Philadelphia 76ers, says he has to handle players differently now. "They're much more sensitive, I have to be careful what I say and the tone of voice I use." Collins says he sometimes asks assistants if he "spoke too harshly to his players" during timeouts or at halftime.

The players are more talented now, bigger, faster, stronger, trained up in the basketball business from much younger ages. However, the net effect of the gracious post-game rapprochment, the man-hugs, the smiles between players who just went head-to-head for 48-minutes, is a far less engaging spectacle and makes an already meaningless game even more meaningless. As does the inability of the average NBA player to consistently make the 15-foot jump shot, a shot pretty much everybody made in the old days.

This new stuff--the man-hugs, the whispered endearments, the encouragement of opponents, is kind of sad, demeaning a sport that is meant to be a test of the individual operating for the sake of the collective. But it must make for good tv--which makes for a good fairy tale that supports the notion that all men are created equal--and tv is meant to sell things like the NBA.