So while most of my now-sports-blogging-peers spent Saturday nights with their families tuned into Hockey Night In Canada, I read Tolkien and Tolstoy, and was one of the more awkward kids I can think of.
At the age of six I had a friend who could rattle off stats and personal anecdotes about every member of the Toronto Blue Jays roster. I was impressed, but at the same time I thought he was fucking nuts. Numbers and stats and watching baseball on t.v. seemed so boring as a kid... I preferred tag, or making house-spanning epic Playmobile war scenes, or better yet, spending hours clenching my jaw so hard that my face shook while glaring at pencils, as I tried to exercise the latent psychic/jedi abilities I was sure I possessed.
In case you couldn't tell from the preceding paragraph, I wasn't much of a sports fan myself, and I was a huge dork. Still, I went to see the Vancouver Canadians fairly often back when they were a AAA team and I always loved that, but to this day I'm not sure if I preferred the games or the McDonald's meals that always accompanied them. I saw the Globetrotters once, and that was pretty cool, but nothing compared to seeing the Grizz live. Them leaving was one of the most brutal blows to my chances at being a sports fan when I was young. Back then, I was a giant and I couldn't skate, so I think in terms of teams to empathize with, it was always going to be the Grizz over the 'Nucks. I only began to follow the Canucks fairly late in highschool, when most of my friends were hockey players and/or fans.
But just because it wasn't until my mid-teens that I started to follow sports, doesn't mean I was a complete butterball. As it stands, I was semi-freakishly tall from grades five through eight or nine, and my gangly limbs were ideal for cross country, track, volleyball, and even, to a certain extent, basketball (I shot with two hands, it looked like I was trying to 'set' a volleyball, and I missed 90% of the time, but I was so much bigger than a lot of kids that I would just get my own rebound again, and again, and again). When I was 11 I found a sport that I was passionate about in fencing, and my natural size advantage over other kids my age gave me some initial success, which I interpreted as 'talent'. Before long, I'd decided to get serious about fencing and quit soccer, track, and all the other sports I used to do to focus on it. I enjoyed some success in U-17 and U-20 competitions and because of the amount of time that I spent training I actually became a better athlete in most other sports.
My newfound ability to jump (a bit) and coordinate my limbs got me back into basketball, which I've played recreationally ever since.
That was a pretty long preamble to explain how I got into playing basketball casually in my late teens, which I'm pretty confident no one cares about, but I wanted to make sure that I had the background properly set for the discussion of how Gilbert Arenas changed my life.
Agent Zero is the single figure that is most responsible for me being a sports fan. And I'm a pretty serious sports fan, despite the paucity of updates over here at the HCP (Steve and I are both sorry). No hyperbole, I'd watched a tiny bit of basketball before discovering him, doing research in hopes of improving my meager skills for our highschool intramural league (the Mini Basketball League), but it wasn't until I started watching Gil, and then reading his blog, that I was completely sucked in.
Not only did he possess the technical skills which, to me at least, make basketball the most aesthetically-pleasing sport out there, but his personality, his swag, and the me-against-the-world personal narrative he brought to every game and every situation inspired me. Despite the fact that other athletes have, to a greater or lesser degree, also tried to impose that same narrative, it's never rung quite as true as it did with Gil. Michael Jordan? Please, he's the greatest and he knows it. The fact that he imagined slights and challenges where none existed is more contemptible than compelling. Kobe's the same, but to a lesser extent. LeBron tried to deliver the us-against-the-world line in Miami, but he's the single athlete who is least able to pull that mindset off, since I'm fairly confident he thinks he's on the Truman Show, and that everyone else on the planet was put there to either serve him or watch him.
Gil, a second-round draft pick, has the kind of human frailty that made it understandable when he held a grudge against Mike D'Antoni, Mike Krzyzweski, and Jerry Colangelo for excluding him from the US Basketball team. And I cheered when, in return, he torched their teams.
Really, this duality of frailness and superhuman ability made him as compelling a character as the NBA has seen. To fans, players, and particularly stars, are supermen, and in many ways we treat them as such. However, Gil was the first basketball star to show us both Superman and Clark Kent. I've never been able to cheer for LeBron because, at least visually, he's simply too dominant. He's Goliath, Godzilla and Venom (I didn't mean to make this list all villains, but my bias runs strong). Gil was short (for his position), pretty lightly muscled, and he wrote a blog—millions of non-athletes can identify with that.
As a fan of the man rather than his team, the news that Gil got traded to Orlando excited me at first. I initially thought it would provide him with the means to resurrect his career, but after stopping to reflect I've come to some harsh realizations:
1) physically, Gil isn't himself anymore
2) Gil will never again be able to be as uncensored and spontaneously funny as he was before the gun incident
3) Gil in a specific "role", which he'll have on the Magic, isn't Gil anymore
So, even though none of these points are the direct result of his trade to Orlando (his role on the Wiz was more rigidly defined this year with Wall around than it was in years past) the trade forced me to think hard about a guy who'd flitted on the edges of my conscious for years now. Gil, as the unique and special player a lot of people from my background and age group learned to love, is no more.
And, to be completely honest, I think that we're going to see a second MJ before we see Agent 2.0.
Check out http://www.bulletsforever.com/ for Gilbert Arenas Tribute Day. There are both extraordinarily cool and surprisingly moving stories among the entries.
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