In the Foxhole

For the professional athlete, no sin compares to the sin of being a bad teammate. It is a flattening, thoroughly destructive label to carry, and, as was discussed yesterday, its truth is completely unknowable. In a league filled with criminals, pastors and family men, all of whom are millionaires, one’s commitment to one’s team is, in some ways, the only way to delineate the good from the bad. This paradox, where the lines that divide are also unknowable and disseminated in vagaries and hearsay, brings up a litany of obvious, and, somewhat silly panoptic metaphors. Once he is tagged as a bad teammate, the athlete, despite the ability to access the media, is helpless, especially when his former teammates, fearing they, too, might get tossed into the bad half of a “divided locker room,” acquiesce and tow the company line.

Consider Ray Lewis, who, despite being acquitted of murder charges, has never been able to muster up a clear picture of what happened in that nightclub. Outside of Peyton Manning, there is no player in the NFL more lionized than Lewis. It seems as if in the estimation of sportswriters, fans and talking heads, Lewis’ very public displays of good-teamsmanship supersede any doubts about his bad-humanness. Similarly, when Kobe was perceived to be a bad teammate, whatever happened or did not happen in that hotel in Colorado was still relevant. Once Mitch Kupchak picked up Pau Gasol and the Lakers won the title, leading to an outpouring of Kobe-Gets-It speak, he was recast as a different sort of machine—the Kobe we had known, the one who was so singularly focused on excellence, had evolved into a Kobe who understood the joy of helping others. All was forgiven. When the sports world brought out its biggest stick to beat down Selfish Lebron, the most commonly evoked foil was Kobe.

Again, our military metaphors are to blame. Within the dying animal that is our macho sports culture, being a bad teammate is akin to ditching your squadron in a foxhole. In real foxholes, a lack of cooperation leads to death, and so, as long as the trust between men is assumed, one can conceivably turn a blind eye towards the indiscretions of his brother. In the military, such logic is necessary, and, I suppose, in sports, the comparison is apt, at least to a point. For any group of men to cohere into one unit, the paramount value that must be established is teamwork towards a common goal.

The logic we assume, then, goes like this: personal problems only hurt you, even if they hurt others, they only hurt the people you hurt. However, if you abandon the team, you are not only hurting all your teammates, individually, but you are spitting on the democratic ethic that binds us all together. If we draw out the military metaphor to its logical end, what we are saying is this: bad teammate, what you are spitting on is America. And in America, treason is punishable by hanging.
























I must admit, despite my inclination to say something damning about this sort of logic, there’s part of me that actually agrees with it. Outside of our allegiances to others and our commitment to a common goal, how, exactly, do we redeem ourselves? I’ve long maintained, mostly for the sake of barroom conversation, that if I was presented with two people: one who stabbed someone and one who serially cuts in line, and was asked to blindly choose one of them to be my friend, I would, without hesitation, choose the stabber. There are reasons to stab someone—maybe the victim invaded your home or threatened your kids—but there is no part of my brain that can understand or empathize with someone who continually cuts in line. His heart is the uglier one because it shows no concern for anyone but himself, and, in the process, pisses all over the unspoken contract about lines: hey, we are going to stand here and we will eventually get to the front as long as nobody cuts.

I do not mean to say that being a bad teammate is somehow worse than beating your wife or shooting someone outside of a club. Such calculations are absurd and generally irrelevant. But, I will say this: there is a cleaner logic to being a good teammate. The sin does not have the capacity to carry any mitigating factors. (even if you hate the coach and organization, you should still be a bro) As such, the violations of good teammate-ness (or line-cutters) dredge up an easily categorized, clearly distilled disgust. And if this question could be somehow abstracted from its many historical contexts, and if we weren’t talking about a game played by oftentimes disinterested millionaires to boost the profile of billionaires, I might even be inclined to agree: treason is the worst sin.

But because we rely on the mainstream media to tell us who is a good teammate and who is not and because these designations fluctuate wildly and seemingly on a whim (if Lebron had stayed in Cleveland, would those Adrian Woj stories have come out? All that stuff about him being a terrible teammate is reported as fact, and yet, it took Lebron acting like an ass for it to come out that he, in addition to being basketball’s Kanye, is also a bad teammate), and because of the justifiably huge sway it has on our opinions of a man, it seems catastrophically foolish to believe anything anyone says about whether someone is a good or bad teammate.

And yet, I still believe that Rashad was a bad teammate in Minnesota and Sacramento, and somehow, it still matters. I guess my need to impose myself and my morals onto the projected image of a basketball player trumps my understanding (opinion, really) that the metaphors and logic are both catastrophically dumb.

Does that side--the one that's really about me--ever lose?