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The Untouchables The NFL is immune to criticism while the NBA takes heat
Updated: Wednesday January 03, 2001 1:50 PM
Sports Illustrated senior writer Jack McCallum touches on a Hot Button issue each Monday on CNNSI.com. After you read Jack's take, give us yours. Sitting in this seat for the better part of a year has taught me one thing about reader reaction: If you so much as hint that the NBA is not a dying institution peopled by miscreants who neither play defense, nor believe in God, nor consume the minimum daily requirement of vitamins and minerals, the feedback will be fast and furious. The NBA is bad, bad, bad and you are supposed to say so at every opportunity. OK, I accept that, and, as I've said on numerous occasions, I also agree that pro basketball has myriad problems it must address. But what I don't understand is why the NFL gets a free pass. This is truly a league at the bottom, not the top, of its game, yet precious few journalists comment negatively about it and fans continue to strip down to their skivvies, paint themselves in team colors and run through frozen stadiums like fraternity pledges to show how much they love the sport. Pro football has become our national pastime, our collective sports obsession, and, dammit, we're all supposed to get behind it. Well, I'm not behind it, and last weekend's playoff games only solidified my feelings.
I hear that the NBA is sloppy (it is) and that its players are sadly lacking in concentration and fundamentals (some are). But has any pro basketball player la-de-dahed a play -- an important play -- more blatantly than the Rams' greasy-fingered return man, Az-Zahir Hakim, la-de-dahed that fair catch he fumbled late in Saturday's game against the Saints? In the NBA, missing, say, a wide-open lay-up is considered an atrocity, but Hakim's muff was considered "just one of those things." I hear that teams in the NBA are unprepared (some are) and play big games in an uninspired fashion (some do). But, man, has any good team come into a showdown flatter than St. Louis came into New Orleans? This Saints team to which the defending Super Bowl champs fell behind 31-7 is not exactly Lombardi's Packers. St. Louis was listless throughout most of the game, yet, predictably, its fourth-period comeback was headlined, by this Web site and in many newspapers, as: Rams Show Heart of a Champion, or something along those lines. Really? For 45 minutes of the game they showed the heart of chumps. The No. 1 criticism I hear about the NBA, of course, is that its players are chest-thumping, trash-talking narcissists who celebrate self at the expense of team. Many are. But the NFL has also become a gathering place for look-at-what-I-just-did thespians. The Saints-Rams game, preceded as it was by a week of gum-flapping, featured many of the kind of players who wildly celebrate a tackle after a two-yard gain and endlessly mug for the cameras after knocking down a pass. One of these days I expect to see an NFL player prance and dance around the end zone because he put on his shoulder pads correctly. The worst offenders on Saturday were the Saints' wide receivers. Having just caught a touchdown pass, Robert Wilson immediately turned and jawboned the defender he beat. On one of his three receiving touchdowns, Wilson's teammate, Willie Jackson, stopped dead at the 10-yard-line and walked into the end zone, the most execrable form of taunting in all of sports. The announcers said nothing about it. But, hey, this is, after all, the NFL -- not the NBA. Sports Illustrated senior writer Jack McCallum writes about a Hot Button issue every Monday on CNNSI.com. The opinions expressed here are solely those of the
writer.
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