TORONTO — Everything about this was…come on, let’s be honest with each other. There’s no other word that applies. It was awesome. No. It was AWESOME.
There was the act itself: bold, brazen, brassy. You’ve seen the video by now. A couple thousand people gathered in Maple Leaf Square outside the Air Canada Centre on Saturday, all of them fixing to watch the Nets-Raptors game on big screens. Toronto’s general manager, Masai Ujiri, is greeting the crowd, and they politely keep the noise going, nothing too crazy.
Then Ujiri starts to exit stage left, before he is clearly seized by a wave of inspiration. He turns once more to the crowd and offers the money quote — “F— Brooklyn!” — and the camera literally starts to shake because the entire gathering goes crazy. And then Ujiri drops the mike — he really does — and that’s that.
There was the non-apology apology: one of the great moments of honesty we’ll ever again see in sports. Ujiri isn’t an old-time basketball Moustache Pete; he knows about camera phones, knows you can’t publicly utter the four-letter-iest of four-letter words without having to answer for it. So he answered for it, apologized to kids for using a word that’s gotten mouths washed out with soap from the beginning of time.
Then added this: “You know how I feel. I don’t like them, but I apologize.”
Translation: “I stand by every syllable.”
There was the rebuttal, a wonderfully ice-cold response from Jason Kidd, who never even twitched a face muscle as he said, in that yawning monotone of his: “I don’t even know who the GM is. I could care less what they think about Brooklyn.”
Translation: “Scoreboard.”
And there was even this, from Toronto’s Amir Johnson, who laughed when Ujiri’s observations were relayed to him and then offered: “I’m with him 100 percent, so if he said ‘F— ’em,’ I say ‘F— ’em’. So I’m with him. That’s pretty funny.”
It’s more than funny. It’s awesome. It was the kind of genuine back-and-forth that’s gotten lost in a sporting world lousy with artificial trash talk and look-at-me. Everything about this was honest, even Kidd’s chilly retort. And it forms the basic, fundamental narrative of any contest worth caring about:
We don’t like you.
We don’t like you, either.
Bring it.
Forget the nonsense of bulletin-board material, of talking out of turn, of giving an opponent extra motivation. These are the NBA playoffs. If the Nets, with half the roster older than Methuselah, need any of that then they’re cooked already. And if the Raptors believe any of that will impact the Nets or the series, then they’re even younger and greener (and dumber) than we thought.
Besides, do the things people allegedly put on bulletin boards ever actually work? You would suspect the Colts would’ve had an entire wall, forget a bulletin board, devoted to Joe Namath before Super Bowl III. Didn’t stop Joe Willie from carving them up and trotting out of the Orange Bowl with his index finger stabbing the air.
How about Muhammad Ali? He did pretty well for a guy who essentially kept the entire bulletin board industry alive and thriving from 1960 to 1980 or so. We like to think that stuff works. We like to think this stuff works, the way it worked for Ridgemont High when somebody wrecked Jefferson’s car before the big game against Lincoln.
But as Garrett Kramer, a New Jersey-based author and mental-performance coach, has written: “ ‘Bulletin board material’ does not work! Actually, it’s impossible for it to work. Quite simply, an external factor has no ability to positively regulate a player’s performance. There is only one place that an athlete, or anyone, can find the freedom necessary to perform with unbounded determination and effort, and that place is one’s own soul.”
So the impact of Ujiri’s performance may be minimal. But that doesn’t mean we can’t cross our fingers and our toes and hope — dream! — that something precisely like it can happen again very soon. We always want the people in sports to tell us exactly how they feel. And this is why.