Game 75: Janice Wise - Fruit Cobbler
On June 4th, the NBA announced that its Board of Governors had voted 29-1 to approve a 22-team restart of the regular season and playoffs. On NBA Twitter, the news barely made a dent in the timeline. It was ten days after Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. It was a week after protesters in Minneapolis, fed up with days of beating and tear gas and rubber bullets by the police and the paltry 3rd degree murder charges against Chauvin, seized the pigsty known as the Minneapolis Police 3rd Precinct and burned it to the ground. It was five days after I saw mysteriously abandoned LAPD cars go aflame at the intersection of Fairfax and Beverly. When the NBA announced the restart on June 4th, it was the first night in five days that Los Angeles did not have a curfew, a pretext that allowed the LAPD and LASD to beat and gas and shoot peaceful protesters while bored National Guard troops looked on.
We’ve been here before, but never like this. What was different about George Floyd’s death? The grim American truth is that his death wasn’t unusual in the least. He was brutally killed by a police officer because he was Black. It’s as revoltingly normal as an American parent dropping their child off at school in the morning and picking up their bullet-riddled corpse in the afternoon. What was different was the response. The confluence of events leading to the response -- the sudden pandemic, months of quarantining, years of organizing by BLM chapters, and decades of abuse by the criminal justice system -- will be studied for as long as America exists.
The NBA’s response to the response was atypical. Unlike MLB, a league that dragged its feet before releasing a statement without the word “police” in it, or the NFL’s Roger Goodell, who was cajoled into saying the words “Black Lives Matter” after a rogue white social media employee secretly reached out to dozens of black NFL players to edit together a statement video, everybody knew where the NBA stood. This is the league run by Adam Silver, the commissioner whose first major move was banning the notoriously racist Donald Sterling from the NBA. This is the commish who encouraged his players to wear “I CAN’T BREATHE” warm-up shirts after Eric Garner’s death at a time when Black Lives Matter was still seen as a fringe movement. But this is also the same commissioner who faced a big test in October 2019 -- one that he failed -- when Houston Rockets Daryl Morey tweeted his support for pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong. Consequences were swift. The Chinese government drastically cut its financial support of the NBA. A CNN reporter was barred from asking questions to James Harden and Russell Westbrook about the comments. And LeBron James infamously tweeted that Morey’s comments were “uneducated.”
It was a harsh reminder that while the NBA publicly supports freedom of speech in America, it does not when it comes to its biggest business partner.
That ardent support of capitalism over human rights brings us back to the great Orlando Bubble Experiment of 2020. If you haven’t been following along, the gist of it goes like this: The NBA is bringing 22 of its 30 teams to Orlando’s Wide World of Disney sports complex (ESPN/ABC, which is owned by Disney, are major business partners with the NBA) to finish out the regular season with 8 games, followed by the postseason. Players will start flying into Florida’s Orange County, a county that recorded more positive tests last Saturday than in all of Italy, on July 7 as they prepare for the July 30 resumption of the season.
Last week, the NBA sent a 113 page handbook to teams detailing how they plan to keep everybody safe inside the bubble. It detailed everything from showering (no more pre and post game fashion shows) to game-time mask wearing (ballboys, medical staff = yes | refs, P.A. announcer = no) to card games (the deck of cards is thrown out immediately after a game). A lot of laughs were had at the NBA banning players from doubles ping pong games despite the sweaty, full contact games of basketball they’ll be playing, but they went into this much detail for a reason: There will be an outbreak in the bubble. How can there not be? This is not a real bubble. Players will be tested “regularly,” meaning not every day. Hotel workers -- housekeepers, janitors, chefs, concierge, etc. -- will not be quarantined inside the bubble with NBA teams. After the first round of the playoffs finish, each remaining team will be allowed to book 15 hotel rooms for outside guests. On the No Dunks podcast, Disney theme park expert Carlyle West said that Disney fans were booking rooms at the three hotels reserved for NBA teams as early as June 22. According to Woj, four players on a Western Conference team tested positive for Covid-19 this month. There is no bubble.
There. Is. No. Bubble.
While the NBA knew they were going to face resistance within due to concerns about safety, they were not prepared for George Floyd. Within days of the bubble plan’s announcement, players like Kyrie Irving and the Lakers’ Avery Bradley voiced their concerns, on behalf of players who feared retribution if they spoke out, about the NBA’s distracting potential to blunt the BLM movement. Irving and Bradley released a statement calling for “the investment of resources and ideas of all league constituencies — from the commissioner’s office, ownership level, management and the players’ association — in social justice reform.” Their preemptive call for real change instead of lip service -- see the English Premier League’s return with players wearing jerseys that read “Black Lives Matters” instead of their names -- was a brave stance given the potential loss of millions and the support for the season’s resumption by LeBron and some of the game’s biggest names.
When the 2019-2020 season began, former Laker Dwight Howard got a chance for redemption when Demarcus Cousins tore his ACL. His resurgence was one of the best stories in the NBA, the future Hall of Famer who spent the 2nd half of his career pissing off teammates and fan bases across the country became a key part of the #1 seed Lakers’ bench. Then the pandemic hit. Basketball became the farthest thing from Dwight’s mind when Melissa Rios, the mother of Dwight’s 6 year old son, died of an epilitic seizure in California. Dwight was quarantined with his children in Georgia when she passed and he had been planning to invite Rios to his home when she died. Dwight revealed this tragedy to reporters two months after her death, telling them "It's bittersweet because I do want to play basketball, but my son right now needs me more than anything." As of right now, it is unclear if Dwight will join the Lakers in July. But we just found out about Avery Bradley: He will not play. On Tuesday night, the Lakers’ starting guard and key defensive player announced he would be skipping Orlando due to his 6 year old son Liam’s recurring respiratory issues. His son would not have been allowed to enter the bubble. If Avery wanted to join the Lakers on their playoff run, it meant not seeing his wife and children for an agonizing three months.
If Dwight wants to join Avery and skip being the NBA’s guinea pig, I fully support it. Danny Green told reporters that the Lakers will need Dwight and Avery when the team reports to Orlando in two weeks. While that’s true… who gives a fuck? I touched on this in my introductory post, where I wrote about experiencing more championships as a child than most NBA fans get in a lifetime. About how my central desire for the 2019-2020 Lakers was watching a team that was fun, even if it didn’t end in Anthony Davis raising the Larry O’Brien trophy. I’m not going to lie and pretend that I’m not desperate for sports right now. But any resumption of sports in the middle of America’s embarrassing response to the pandemic and the biggest civil rights movement since the 1960s is, at worst, putting NBA players, NBA staff, and countless Floridians at risk while dampening a campaign against injustice, and, at best, no fun at all.
What kind of sociopath thinks they’re going to have fun in July 2020? That question was rhetorical. You can find your answer eating and drinking and tipping poorly inside of restaurants, night clubs, and bars all across the United States of America.
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Fruit Cobbler
¾ stick butter
½ cup sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
Fruit sweetener
¾ cup flour
½ cup milk
3 cups peaches or other fruit
Melt butter in a baking dish. Mix flour, baking powder, sugar, and milk in a mixing bowl. Add peaches. Mix well and pour on top of butter. Top with fruit sweetener to taste. Bake at 350 degrees for 40 to 60 minutes.
A cobbler is one of those dishes that seem implanted in your memory from the moment you are born. Cake, pie, tart, crumble, cobbler. Sure, I know what a cobbler is! It’s a crust filled with fruit and… wait, that’s a pie. No, I know. It’s actually fruit which is topped with butter and sugar and flour and… wait, no that’s a crumble. What exactly is a cobbler?
As I found out, a cobbler is when you layer a baking dish with melted butter, then you add in a flour/sugar/milk/fruit mixture that seem like far too little ingredients to get baked properly with the pool of butter you just microwaved. Even though it’s put together a little haphazardly -- would it shock you that the British government encouraged both crumbles and cobblers during the rationing days of WWII? -- the cobbler does end up with a buttery bottom layer that holds it all together. But how does it taste? I had to substitute apples for peaches, not for any pandemic-related shortages but because peaches are not in season in May. So maybe I’m doing Lakers PR assistant Janice Wise a disservice by saying that it sucked. But… it was not good. Winston Churchill may have rallied the British people to withstand years of war and bombings with his resilient spirit, but he couldn’t fix the English’s biggest problem: their food.
