Read this story about the media slobbering over Tyler Hansbrough’s dick and the possible vaguely racist undertones underneath said knobgobbling. I don’t necessarily believe in widespread conspiracies, conscious or unconscious, to elevate the status of a hard-nosed white player over everyone else; I’d like to give the broadcasting nation a little more benefit of the doubt than that.
However, I do hate Hansbrough. That hatred isn’t a result of the media loving him – it’s more just that I have seen him play many times, and there are aspects of his game that happen to eternally remind me of everything I hate about professional and collegiate basketball.
He flops. You’d hope this is the exclusive province of European douchebags like Ginobli and Divac, but it turns out that particular skill is something we must’ve brought over with the Mayflower and the pox-infested blankets. Europe had it, now we do. I swear, there isn’t a UNC game that goes by that doesn’t feature the 6-9, 250-pound Hansbrough improbably being “bowled over” by a player a fourth of his size. That’s not just douchebaggery – that’s douchebaggery that defies the laws of physics and momentum. Shouldn’t we be employing officials that understand mass and force and gravity and shit?
His offensive repetoire, so renowned as “relentness” and such, consisting of posting up, being fed the ball, and then slamming his head into the chest of the stationary defender and tossing the ball up over the man knocked backwards, and all the while acting like he is the one being subjected to unfair physicality.
Worst of all, he disappears for long stretches of games. He happens to be playing on a very talented team, and so that doesn’t matter as much as it would for say, Beasley, but that doesn’t excuse him. He disappeared for the second half of the Duke game last week, but as soon as he got a rebound or threw a fist pump, the pitched storyline was “Wow, Hansbrough – Psycho T! You are a fountain of inexplicable and admirable intensity, young man! Marry my daughter!”
I shouldn’t be a hater – it’s not that long ago I was a unathletic white kid trying to make it in basketball by relying upon by toughness and effort. My only problem, of course, was that I wasn’t tough and didn’t care about any of the games, so my strategy of relying upon my “will to win,” so to speak, never exactly got off the ground. My dead, lazy ass, my father is fond of telling me even now, never got off the ground, either.
Not that I’m bitter about that.
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Announcers ridiculing the notion of Hansbrough over Beasley for player of the year:
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