Bromance

While I'm in football mode, a basketball story got a lot of peoples' attention today and became widely discussed. That story was the revelation that LeBron James and Kevin Durant were seen training with each other in LeBron's hometown of Akron, OH. This is nothing new, as they did the same thing last year during the lockout. This one caused a particular stir as LeBron and his Miami Heat beat Durant's Oklahoma City Thunder in 5 in this year's NBA Finals. This raised a lot of controversy in the Twitterverse and the blogosphere, and even led the Wil Wheaton to my Sheldon Cooper (If you don't get the reference, watch The Big Bang Theory), Skip Bayless, to tweet this today:

KD tweeted back with a response, but he has since deleted it.

As you guys know, I am no fan of Skip and think he is an insufferable jackass who often likes to target certain people he feels do not fit his view of what an athlete should be and is a contrarian purely for shock value, and I dread the days when his opinions come even close to matching mine. Today is one of those days I dread. I really like Kevin Durant, and I guess I respect LeBron, and what they choose to do is purely their business, but I don't like the idea. I know, times have changed, and these new cats in the NBA are all doing more things together, probably stemming from AAU ball, where a lot of them knew each other, but to me, it just seems weird and unnatural. Why? I don't know. When I think of sports, I have this image of guys, who, while friendly off the court/field, want to rip each others' heads off on it. Now, does this mean training together will make either of these two less competitive? Of course not, they will go at each other on the court regardless. Does it bother me? Not that much, despite me writing about it. Do I find it to be a violation of some unwritten basketball rules? Hell no. Is it something I'm unaccustomed to because of a certain way I grew up watching basketball? Yes. 

Maybe it's because I started watching basketball in the late '90s, when I was just a little one. But when I think of basketball, I think of the older dudes, who may have been friendly off-court, but wanted to kill each other on it. For example, in Jack McCallum's book Dream Team (which I recommend), about the 1992 Olympic Dream Team,  McCallum recounts stories of Michael Jordan verbally abusing the hell out of Clyde Drexler, who he had just beaten in the Finals that June. Maybe it's just me, used to 16 years of Kobe, who refuses to do any of that buddy-buddy stuff, and even on Team USA in the Olympics, is the lone assassin with a singular focus constantly working at his craft, like Batman/Bruce Wayne in The Dark Knight trilogy. Maybe guys like Kobe, Tim Duncan, Dirk Nowitzki, KG, and Derrick Rose, really are the last of a dying breed, the last "I'm gonna work at it alone" type of guys. Either way, it is a reminder of how much the game has changed in such a short amount of time.