Black Hole Sun

I have a 360-pound load on my mind.

It's been approximately 48 hours since my officemates and I stared glassy-eyed at the espn.com headline declaring the Phoenix Suns as Shaquille O'neal's new team. Within that same time span, I've read countless NBA "experts", columnists, bloggers, and even anonymous NBA execs pretty much express their own version of the basic phrase: "They gave away Marion for Shaq?!?! You have got to be fucking kidding me!!!"

It's been a good two solid days and I still haven't gotten over it yet. Judging from the ceaseless deluge of Shaq-to-Suns commentaries flooding the web as I write this, I'm not so sure the whole world has gotten over it either.

I don't think the question whether or not the Suns can win a championship with Shaq even matters in this anymore, although that's what people seem to be arguing about. Deep down, they don't really care about the NBA championship right now. Because right now, all they've been thinking about - all WE'VE been thinking about - is how Steve Kerr and Mike D'Antoni have instantly ruined our lives.

You see, that's what sports does - it ruins lives. I think it's the ONLY element of civilized soceity that can actively do that. To follow politics, for instance, one must already have pre-acknowledged the fact that government is fucked-up, to a certain degree. If you're a fan of music or film, you are appreciating something that is final and successful, because otherwise you won't be hearing it or seeing it. So in essence, you are appreciating something that is "PERFECT". If you're a Radiohead fan and you LOVE "Street Spirit", it doesn't matter that you hate every single post-Kid A song they've ever recorded. You love Radiohead because they were responsible for a song that you love.

With sports, it's a little trickier. When I was in High School, I was a huge fan of Pat Riley's Knicks. I loved absolutely everything about them: Patrick Ewing's exaggerated shooting stroke, the arc on John Starks' three point shots, Charles Oakley's penchant for sliding on to the floor for looseballs, Anthony Mason's precarious dribbling, Madison Square Garden's classic organ music...everything. It wasn't "PERFECT" basketball as exemplified by Michael Jordan during the same time, but it was "perfect" for an entirely different reason. The Knicks were made up of eight solid, muscular, ungraceful, hardworking athlete-thugs playing for a town with rich blue-collar inner-city traditions. It was like an imperfect director being grouped with imperfect actors in an imperfect location to film a movie that was PERFECT for them.

When they reached the NBA Finals in '94, I wasn't confident that they would win, largely because Hakeem was playing out of his mind at the time. But I knew that they HAD to win. It was the only conclusion to that season that would make any sense. The Bulls won after years of abuse from the Pistons. Same for the Pistons with the Celtics. It only made sense that another hardworking Eastern Conference team became champion after years of abuse from the previous dynasty.

Then in Game 7, Vernon freaking Maxwell proceeded to ruin everything. I watched in utter state of shock as everything he threw up was falling down, while the exact same opposite was happening to John Starks. It was heartbreaking.

Years later, the Knicks would gradually re-tool. John Starks became Allan Houston; Anthony Mason became Larry Johnson; Derek Harper became Chris Childs; Charles Oakley became Marcus Camby. I would follow all those Jeff Van Gundy teams, revel with every small triumph, die slowly with every inexplicable choke-job, but the real Kincks for me were still that '94-'95 team. And unlike the Radiohead fan, I can't honestly say that rooting for the Knicks has been a satisfactory experience. I did LOVE their one year. But that one year wasn't complete.

That is why NBA fans all over the world are grieving now. Not because they honestly believe that Shaq's going to be this gigantic incongruity that would suck the entire team down (although some of them actually do). They're greiving because the team they LOVE is over, it's gone, and we didn't even get to see it succeed.

And EVERYONE loved the Suns. They were led by a quiet, humble, indie-rock point guard dishing pretty assists to frantic speedsters and monstruous dunkers. Everything about them was about speed and precision. Now they gave away one of their best speed guys for the dinosaur known as Shaq, last seen trudging along through the Miami Heat's unwatchble season.

The concept of perfection (or should I say "imperfection") has been prominently hugging the sports zeitgeist for a couple of weeks now, thanks to the New England Patriots and their still-puzzling collapse in the Superbowl. The now legendary upset has prompted everyone to assume an I-told-you-so stance and wax poetic about how perfection in sports almost never happens, how it's this huge impossibility that was merely demonstrated by the Patriots' loss.

I personally think that these people are taking the concept of perfection too literally. It's very easy to fall into that trap with sports, what with all the stats and clear-cut rules and scoring systems that give us a strong sense of absolutism. But to link "perfection" with statistics would be missing the point entirely.

The Patriots were never a perfect team. Had they beaten the Giants as expected, they still wouldn't be. Because they were remarkably flawed, the same way all movie villains are. They had the humorless, smug coach, the snobbish pretty-boy quarterback, the supremely and effortlessly athletic yet showboat receiver, and they had a shady scandal bugging them all up to Superbowl weekend. Their flaws were actually so cliche that it's so hard to regard them as perfect.

The truly perfect team from the recent NFL season was actually Brett Favre's Packers. Everyone loved the grizzled-veteran's-one-last-hurrah story, because it was a perfect story. That is why America is still in denial mode that this perfect story was actually ruined by its own hero. As far as everyone's concerned, that interception in OT didn't happen.

A 360-pound, soon-to-be-36-year-old, past-his-prime presence, though, is incredibly hard to deny. The speedy Suns are not so speedy anymore. The Matrix is gone. The Big Washed-Up is going to cram himself into this once beautiful creation, singlehandedly transforming it beyond recognition. It's going to take a while to recover from this.