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I was already enamored of Gonzaga forward Adam Morrison. I've had a thing for his team since before their Elite 8 run, back when Vallejo's Brandon Armstrong was on the team. And I like the idea of the West Coast Conference more generally. Although my primary allegiance is always with Cal, I'm fond of USF and can get behind Saint Mary's and Santa Clara without too much prodding. But Gonzaga has been my favorite WCC team to watch. They always seem to have one or two distinctive players worthy of a crush: Santangelo, Calvary, Dickau, Turiaf and now Morrison. But this story on Morrison from the San Francisco Chronicle has raised my passions to a new height: Morrison, 21, is certainly not the only college kid who wept when the alternative-rock band Rage Against the Machine broke up. But he's probably the first to berate himself after a game for "playing like a communist.'' He has teased his devout coach, Mark Few, by quoting Marx on a locker-room board: "Religion is the opiate of the masses.''
Few says college basketball hasn't had a personality like Morrison since Bill Walton.
"He's open to all thoughts,'' Few said on the phone. "He's well read. He's a great debater. He enjoys a healthy debate. When you cut to the core, some of the things he says, he doesn't believe. I find it entertaining most of the time.''
Teammate Sean Mallon put a slightly different twist on Morrison's locker-room rhetoric, telling the Oregonian, "Sometimes he doesn't know what he's talking about, but that doesn't stop him from having a strong opinion.''
Studying the Russian Revolution in a high school history class piqued his interest in Marx. He read "The Communist Manifesto'' and Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations.'' Despite his interest in political science, he's a sports-management major ("There's no money in philosophy"). As for the Marxism, he said, "I don't necessarily believe all of it, but some of it is reasonable.'' I've been sitting here working on my laptop, absent-mindedly watching the Gonzaga-Santa Clara game and Morrison is once again putting on a show. He has 21 points at the half. And a poster of Karl Marx in his room! Tags: leftism, sports
Muse: the soothing sounds of the Deuce
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I also agree that the only reason Morrison has read Marx is ironically because he is bourgeouis. Gonzaga has quickly established itself as Duke University's west coast campus and Morrison has cemented that identity with his late-night bouts of online gaming with the other great white hope of the moment, Duke's J. J. Reddick. The fact that there are two amazing WHITE shooters in the NCAA ranks right now gives every college beat writer in the country a stiffy, and the fact that they are friends makes those writers cream in their pants. Duke, being Duke, has the ability to recruit the best white players in the country. I do not think it is Duke's policy to target white players but it is Duke's policy to target middle class players. They do not recruit from the ghetto, so to speak, but from the suburbs and the prep schools. Even Duke's black players are from the suburbs or not even from America at all (the recently departed Luol Deng). The one black player on your list of Gonzaga players, Turiaf, fits that mold. Duke's and Gonzaga's players get in less trouble, speak more articulately, and appear more intelligent not because of anything the schools or the coaches have done, but because they have had privileged upbringings. The year the University of Maryland won the championship, everyone fell in love with Kryzewski again because he said he would have loved to coach Juan Dixon. A nice gesture but a fantasy as well. K will never coach a Juan Dixon. Why would he take a chance on an undersized guard who also happens to be the orphan of two dead heroin addicts when he can get the nation's best prototype guard with an ideal upbringing and zero emotional baggage? The next obvious step in my rant is to discuss the educational aspects of college athletics but that would take too long. That's why I didn't reply to your comment on my post about college football. I do not think your optimism is completely mislead but I do think it needs lots of qualification.
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Neverthless, the overwhelming tendency is for white, middle-class players to go down the future Republican path, as J.J. Redick has done. While I agree that there is a racist undercurrent to the lionization of both Redick and Morrison, that doesn't detract from my pleasure at seeing the latter taking the road less traveled, however minor the results of that decision. As far as the "I'd love to coach Juan Dixon," comment, I come at that sort of thing a little differently. Most college athletes fall between the circumstances of Dixon and Shane Battier. Cal and Arizona have both had plenty of players who might not pass muster at Duke or Stanford, who come from lower income urban areas, but who still have a more stable support structure to fall back on than someone like Dixon. So has Maryland. Some of those athletes end up learning a lot more than how to stay on the team. Others do not. But I still think that college athletics are worth preserving so long as those who do learn -- and get degrees -- are exposed to opportunities that would otherwise pass them by. It isn't even about money. Negotiating college life prepares lower-income and working-class athletes for a world where they will have to deal with the lingering effects of privilege in a way that a simple check never could. It's not the same as reading Bourdieu -- or Marx, for that matter -- but it still matters.
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