Anyway, although I am enjoying my Blake Boners for the moment, they also make me very afraid for what the future holds. The thing is, I know that someday the national love fest surrounding Griffin is going to come to a screeching halt.
I know that one day a lot of people are going to hate Blake Griffin. How can I say this with such confidence? Because we have already seen it happen dozens of times over.
The reason that we all love Blake Griffin so much right now is because we care about him only for what he does on the court, which is undeniably beautiful and raw and thunderous. Eventually, however, we are going to get used to watching him do his “NBA Jam” routine on a nightly basis, and then he will become just another basketball player.
Deadspin’s Barry Petchesky already touched on the inevitability of this normalization back in January. Petchesky wrote:
“Titles are won after that changeover from myth to superstar. The player figures out what he has in himself, and only then can he harness it into some kind of kinetic energy. It's not nearly as romantic as potential energy.”
Petchesky knows that someday Griffin is going to cease to be the un-molded ball of ferocious energy that we so enjoy him as now; that some day he is going to solidify into a rigid, definable superstar and the romance surrounding him will die.
What I am concerned about is the part that comes after this solidification. Even when we stop being so enamored with Griffin’s game, we are still going to have to find something to say about him on a daily basis. This will lead us to begin talking about Blake Griffin as a person, and we aren’t going to like what we find.
We’ve been through this with oh so many superstars that have come before Griffin.
Not too long ago, people were just as in love with Kobe Bryant, Allen Iverson, Kevin Garnett and Lebron James as they are now with Blake Griffin. Bryant was loved for his merciless scoring ability, Iverson for his fast twitch crossover that could make Michael Jordan look stupid, Garnett for his unyielding passion and intensity, and LeBron for his inability to hide how much fun he was having on the basketball court.
We loved all of these guys simply because they were doing things on the court that we had never really seen before, and that was all we needed.
But after awhile things became routine, and we started searching for things other than their games to talk about. Soon it wasn’t enough just to talk about them as players, it became necessary to start talking about them as people.
Is Kobe Bryant actually a selfish, maniacal asshole?
Is Allen Iverson actually a disrespectful thug?
Is LeBron James actually an arrogant, soulless shithead?
Is Kevin Garnett actually a mean spirited bully?
Granted, each of these guys did things that greatly exacerbated people’s willingness to turn on them, but it seems as if we were doomed to start hating them no matter what we found out to be true about them as people, because as people they could never live up to the perfection that they represented as players. No one on Earth possibly could.
It’s not hard to believe in this inevitability when you consider that LeBron James is probably the most loathed of this group at the moment, even though all he did was exercise his right as a free agent; whereas Kobe Bryant was accused of rape after putting his dick into a place where he was specifically told not to.
In what twisted moral universe are those two offenses deserving of equal amounts of hatred? One in which hatred is all that’s left to keep us entertained.
Someday, fairly or unfairly, something unlikable about Blake Griffin is going to come to the light, and we will all latch on to it for no other reason than we need something to talk about. Maybe he’ll get spotted in a night club with Lindsay Lohan, and we’ll all begin questioning his judgment. Or maybe he’ll get spotted corpse-fucking a dead dolphin on a secluded Japanese coast line, and we’ll all begin to wonder if he’s really got the heart of champion. No one can say for sure.
What I can say for sure is that one day you are very likely going to find yourself hating Blake Griffin. Someday you are going to be watching him soar through the air, poised to convert yet another face melting alley oop; and instead of yelping with excitement, you’re going to mutter something like, “Fuck that guy, he’s an asshole.”
So do yourself a favor, and enjoy him while you can.
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