My soul is dull and slack; in vain do I jab the spur of desire into its side; it is exhausted, it can no longer raise itself up in its royal jump."--Søren Kierkegaard, "Diapsalmata"
There were some pretty exotic crowd sounds echoing around KeyArena last week, as the Sonics dropped consecutive games to the Celtics and the Atlanta Hawks. It was ugly and depressing. Like the disjunctive nuances of a nightmare, I'm finding the human-crowd noises as difficult to describe as they are unnerving to recall. The best I can do is ask you to imagine the collective turmoil of 15,000 people... simultaneously losing their religions. Fifteen thousand people gradually awakening to the sad fact that their team--once so promising, so full of life and excitement--has been poisoned by a deep mediocrity.
The process of disenchantment is entirely pre-linguistic: It starts with the high-pitched hiss of air going out fast, like after a nasty sucker punch; then there's shock, a bit of confused squawking, followed by an unpleasantly amalgamated murmur, a sort of painful moan-whine that signals an inevitable dawning of truth. What comes next is anger. Anger eventuated by a sense of spiritual and fiscal betrayal. Anger that expresses itself in the erratically modulated protest known as booing. Booing: First time I've heard that leveled en masse at the Sonics this year. From hope to hopelessness, from excitement to caterwauling, all in the space of a game. To find yourself in the middle of such a thing is to be completely overtaken by two primitive emotions: revulsion and pity. There's nothing like it. It's horrible. (I'm using the word "horrible" in the most narrow and disposable context, of course. When I assert instead that the myopic and utterly inhumane bombing of a beleaguered Arab country by a fascistic president is "horrible," it should be clear that I mean something altogether different. It's important, as a sports fan, to keep a sense of scale.)
For me, booing is like heroin: I've never done it myself, but I certainly understand the appeal. And in the dual travesty of the Boston and Atlanta games, with everyone around me partaking of that most unsporting opiate of the masses, I almost slipped. It wasn't because of the losses, per se; as Charlie Chaplin, T. S. Eliot, and Paul Westerberg have readily exhibited to the world, there can be beauty in defeat. What galls is giving up the ghost without a fight, without any semblance of grace or desire. That's why I chose the Kierkegaard quote to start this column. Minus the precious poetry, those words could have been uttered by Coach McMillan himself.
It was generally acknowledged, coming out of the All-Star break, that the Sonics needed to win 20 of their next 30 games in order to squeak into the playoffs. The way they stumbled out of the gate at their most recent game--somnambulate, befuddled, lacking a center of gravity--it appeared that they didn't give a rat's ass one way or the other.
Appearance is the operative word here: appearance versus potential. It's no fluke that Seattle has beaten the Lakers, Sacramento, and Portland this year. Like the New York Knicks, they have enough talent to overcome their own inadequacies and become a good team. They just lack the fight. If they gave at least the appearance of desire, of struggle, then any sort of booing would be unjustified. But, whatever the source of their exhaustion, they've lost their "royal jump." The ancient Greeks referred to this malady as acedia, or spiritual indifference. It's sad to behold. And Coach McMillan can yell all he wants. One can't coach inspiration.
