An Incomparable Six Weeks

I am a die-hard Albert P [ujols]. and St. Louis Cardinals fan. However, even I believe that Roger Federer deserved this award. Wade?? Another poor choice from a league that no longer interests the average american reader.

• Stlgirl, at the SI.com feedback page.

"He just went off the charts," says former Heat coach Stan Van Gundy, now a consultant with the team. "Dwyane literally for six weeks played the game at a level that almost no one's ever played at. I don't know that Jordan ever played a better Finals."

-  S.L. Price, writing in the Dec. 11 issue of Sports Illustrated

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I found both of those passages fascinating, for different reasons. Let's take them one at a time. When a diehard baseball fan writing from her hometown about a player on her team writes what the comment poster above did, you just know that the Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the Year controversy may be about a lot of things,but it isn't about a bunch of loopy tennis fans (us) protesting against inordinate myopia and ethnocentricity (them), or Roger Federer KADs lashing out in a fit of drunk-on-Goofy Berry frustration.

In fact, the most remarkable aspect of the backlash against SI  - and the source of whatever cold comfort Federer backers may feel - is the degree of dissent and even outrage expressed over the snub of Federer by folks other than the usual suspects. You wonder if Federer is on the radar of the public-at-large? You'll find the answer to that writ large at SI's SOTY feedback page (linked above). To take that to the next level, what does it say about Federer's accomplishments when so many of the pro-Federer comments are prefaced with disclaimers like: I hated tennis from the day Satan impregnated my mother, but I have to say. . .

One of the sadder aspects of this saga is that the tsunami that was launched by SI's decision to name Dwyane Wade SOTY must have a "So what am I, chopped liver?" affect on the honoree himself. Wade seems like a good, decent kid, and his story is to some degree inspirational, if not quite as much, IMO, as Scott Price's profile suggests. SI's curiously tepid teaser "A Sports Hero We can All Admire" is telling. With all due respect to Wade and SI, I can rattle off, oh, a few dozen of those, starting with refugee-turned-Top Five tennis player, Ivan Ljubicic. And therein lies the rub, but I'm getting ahead of myself here.

So we have a scenario here suggesting that both Wade and Federer deserve better, because this year's SOTY will forever be remembered as the year Federer got hosed, and if Wade didn't exactly do the hosing, he was the beneficiary of it.

And that will always imply that he backed into (or was shoved, backwards into) legitimacy.

One of the brighter aspects of this saga is the degree to which it has boosted Federer's own profile, if not his resume, simply by virtue of the controversy. Or, put it this way: If The Mighty Fed had been named SOTY, X-number of sports fans disinterested in tennis would have just shrugged and thrown aside the magazine from disinterest.

Now, TMF has captured their attention. I'm no cynic, but sometimes it really does boil down to controversy being a tremendous source of positive publicity.

Want to bet that TMF gets a lot more love next time he plays in the U.S.? Want to bet that this still leaves the typical Federer fan stomping his foot, arms folded on his or her chest?

Now for the second excerpt. The part about Wade having had an incomparable six weeks is nothing short of astonishing. Didn't Federer have, roughly, 47 weeks of nonpareil distinction? And what about the two years before, when his record was, for our purposes here (as well as, theoretically, SI's) nearly identical? That this kind of disconnect occurred leads you to the only aspect of this mess still worth talking about. How could SI come to such a decision?

I think there are two explanations: a simple one, and a complex one.

First, consider the element of surprise. You can take it as an article of faith that in Big Media, surprise choices are the grail. You can't just throw anybody out there as SOTY, yet at the same time going with someone who appears to be a slam-dunk choice simply isn't going to get you the attention that leads people to conceive of these kinds of awards in the first place (see "publicity", above).

But that's the easy part.

The other reason is a little more nuanced. If you read Scott's well-crafted profile, you'll sense a reaching for larger significance in Wade's biography, which is sadly tinged with family and drug-related difficulties. But there's more, and here's the money line: And a league that, in comparison with its glorious past, had been found wanting at last had the real deal: a throwback star with crossover cachet and 21st-century moves. That has a ring to it. Perhaps a little too much of one.

Further on, Scott implies that the Miami Heat's championship run (led, inarguably, by Wade) was a presumably sorely needed moment of, to use the mot de jour, "healing" for Miami - a city that has its share of social problems. I find the resort to this overused convention somewhat puzzling.

Granted, I'm not a big NBA fan, and I don't have an inside track on Miami's civic problems (Scott, on the other hand, has lived there). But I have to wonder, is Miami is in greater need of healing than most other major U.S. cities, and does anybody really believe that these isolated, sports-related moments have any kind of significant curative power?

I'd say the answer to the first part of that question is "unlikely", but even if you want to go there,  isn't New Orleans a far more better target for this sort of designation (for more on that issue, see my colleague Steve Tignor'spost on the SOTY debate)?  So overall, I got the feeling reading the profile that Scott was forced to be a bit of a contortionist, having to do a lot with, if not exactly little, then a fair amount that is, at best, nebulous, hard to quantify, and of questionable "hard" value.

Jumping into a river where two children were floundering with the final words "I can't swim too good, but I've got to try to save those kids", as former Kansas City Chiefs running back Joe Delaney did, has hard value (Delaney died; he has been one of my all-time heroes ever since I read the story of that tragic day - in SI). Bringing a championship to our city, which is theoretically what all athletes are paid to do, has less.

All that is beautifully underscored by the "incomparable six weeks" quote, suggesting that the subtext to the Wade choice was driven by the kind of simplified, sentimental terms in which the popular media loves to traffic:

We've got this terrific kid who's an African-American, a potential role model, and he comes with an easy-to-follow story line that's familiar enough to keep our readers comfortable, yet dark enough to slack our thirst for morality tales.

From there, it's an easy, very tempting, and in many ways understandable leap to: Demographically, this is a home run, now all we need to do is adequately justify the selection.

Enter, the incomparable six weeks - aka, the hook.

In a way, it's the oldest story in the book, and right in the strike zone for any purveyor of human interest stories. More damagingly for SI's cause, it's hard to link the HI aspects to the SOTY template; human interest elements don't necessarily translate to the critical "impact on the sport" element that is major part of SI's criteria. Even the most inspirational story on earth doesn't necessarily have meta-personal impact. But as SI is finding out, trying to make it so can put you in an incomparable six weeks of media hell.