I’m still shaking my head at the Bill Russell/Kevin Garnett schmaltzfest that I witnessed during halftime of the Celtics/Cavs on Saturday. Man what the freaking flipping frick? I don’t know what offends me more – Bill Russell’s sanctimonious made-for-television brand of artificial emotion, the Field of Dreams movie music and its air of bizarrely portentous mysticality, or Stuart Scott wrapping the whole thing by informing us with macho gravitas that “if you don’t have chill-bumps right now, then you just don’t get it.”↵
In Which We Beg to Differ With ESPN and the Importance of the Bill Russell-KG Interview
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↵↵I guess I just don’t get it. My understanding is that what we saw were some highlights from a much longer interview between the two. If that’s true, if those are the highlights, then pretty much nothing happened except for some manufactured tear-jerkitude interrupted by periodic bursts of not-that-funny funniness.↵
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↵The general set-up of the scene is Wise Man Shares His Wisdom With Knoweldge-Seeker, with Russell as Caine and Garnett as Sparrow. KG tells Bill that wearing the Celtic green is a responsibility and he thinks about that a lot and finds it meaningful. Bill tells KG that he’s going to win titles in Boston, and if he doesn’t then Bill will share one of his with him (dah, how exactly would that work? Is that really supposed to make anyone feel better? “Hey Kevin, if you aren’t man enough to get yourself a ring of your own, I’ll let you bask in the glow of one of mine cause I got like a hundred cause I’m ALL man”), and then, THEN, Bill tells KG that he’s as proud of Garnett as he is of his own kids. ↵
↵↵You can almost hear the producer standing three feet away from them yelling, “CUT… guys guys guys let’s get the waterworks flowing here already… stop wasting our time and make each other cry!”↵
↵↵Look, if Bill Russell and Kevin Garnett actually have this relationship in real life, if Bill really is KG’s mentor of sorts, good for them. But having the Worldwide Leader stage something like this, that feels so contrived and bathetic and devoid of content and then shove it down our throats with Stuart Scott up in our faces telling us that it’s IMPORTANT DAMMIT ... it felt to me like some seriously cynical mass media manipulation. Personally, I would have thought Bill Russell was above this whole business. For some reason I’m reminded of that Eddie Murphy riff about how Bill Cosby called him trying to give him advice like he was the wise elder statesman of comedians and Eddie said, “F--- you Bill, I’m offended that you called,” and then he told Richard Pryor about it and Richard said, “if he calls again, you tell him to have a Coke and a smile and shut the f--- up.” ↵
↵↵The point being, I give Bill Russell all the props in the world for what he did, but if I’m Kevin Garnett and he starts telling me how proud he is of me and how I can borrow his championships if I can’t get my own, and especially if he’s telling me all this with the TV cameras rolling and the general expectation that I’m supposed to get all teary-eyed and reverent just because he was a great player and I’m a great player and we happen to represent the same team in the same city (the same city, by the way, that Bill Russell loathed). If all that was going down, I have to imagine I’d be SORELY tempted to say something like “all due respect Bill but last I checked you ain’t my daddy and I ain’t your b----, so you go on and cheer for me like everybody else and that’ll make me happy but save your pride for your own damn kids cause I’m my own man and this is my time and furthermore this here prime-time conversation is a bunch of fakeass touchyfeely crapola.”↵
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