How Canada’s Vince Carter Conversation Can Get From Painful To Playhouse.

Wince And For All, call game on the dribble-drivin' discord between Toronto and the ROC. Vince Carter was the draw for a lot of people to basketball, but his marketing condescended to existing fans.

“I’ve seen plays that were more exciting than this.”

Some notes to Vince Carter and his crew, ahead of Nov. 2, which everyone hopes will go well. There is still a chance to understand.

The Air Canada hype was contested from the moment it began, not after the losing and the moping, and the betrayed envy when Chris Bosh became the top scorer. The condescension to Canadians who were into basketball was inevitable when national marketing informs them nothing was there until someone from another place enlightened us, and gee there is no historical metaphor.¹

Low end of the scale, but that is erasure; p.s., coining a nickname that played off stigmatization of people with mental illness… essentially, it is the resentment that will always be there. The big business pushes wants smooth and shiny, and those who have seen the jagged rocks and the ones just below the waterline, and not from a powerboat in the Muskokas. #ClassConsciouness

Flipside: how does no one in Cynic Canada get it? It is unwell to hold it in or put it all on someone who was a young player. Watch Bird On A Wire (dir. Stephen Soderbergh, Netflix, 2019) for the catch-up on how athletes’ handlers can get it wrong. The up-top leadership were seasoned in life but green at running an NBA organization. The most tedious sports fans are the ones who keep bringing up something someone did when they were 25.

This is tragicomic, at the mild level. It’s a pivot into circular reference, the “is a series of references where the last object references the first, resulting in a closed loop.” It is not healthful to keep picking old sores.

If you cannot spot someone acting out the “Men would rather go to therapy than…” meme, whelp, re-watch Rounders. Vince Carter is an eight-time NBA all-star with a matchless claim in the record book of the premier athletic show in the world. You could look it up. A jersey retirement is an automatic checked box.

There is a failed Shurety Test, i.e., Do It In The Playoffs.² Luck and circumstances overdetermine outcomes. His hall-of-fame argument that his winddown of a record 22-season includes guiding the young players will surely appear in paeans to Joe Thornton very, very soon. What is the difference in the career value?

He was exceptional. The hoopla exposed a Toronto vs. the ROC divide. The repair job is to say, on the Team Vince side, you were an expansion franchise that did not see whether the support beams were built before the marketing might was put behind it.³

Right off the hop, throwing this out there for theatre kids who have a smooth jumper at open gym. Send this to the people of The Arkells’ Max Kerman. The relationship between Vince Carter-the Raptors-the moneymachine can only be repaired like everything else. Sports are theatre. It is not far-fetched.

This has been therapeutic. It will go a long way to helping understand that it sports can be a results-based business for the business, but fans can just roll with it and hope it lasts. Resolve this, and will be wiser.

So, Vince: The Musical (you asked for this)

Do this up as Vince Carter: The Musical. It’s two characters who can’t communicate, in the theme of that boring Canadian novel.

It’s a fringe festival two-adult, one-small-child play. It will not be done as a musical. That was a quiet con.

One represents Carter and the strain of the Raptors fanbase that rode the Vince hypetrain and is now being beckoned to buy in for his nostalgia tour phase of public life. Over time, they will realize what was lost on each side, then, what both would not let themselves see. The crowd warms up, it goes along, and then the curtain calls are chants to bring back the Vancouver Grizzlies and the Seattle Sonics. Winwinwin, and there is a hoop out back.

Following?

Your characters

Xavier Donnelly. Born-to-wealth-and-connections now early-30s businessperson whose family had season tickets from the getgo. His father was an Day 1 investor who needed a hard sell since he was convinced basketball would never work in Canada. Now taking his own children to games. Really, everything he says is just repeating what he overheard when his dad would be on conference calls.

Jayme Souviens. Oh, no, a Xennial, and from somewhere not in the Toronto bubble, or another major city, to boot. Appply of The Office’s adaptors choice of Scranton since it was not that far New York, but it needs to be somewhere in the east that is not Montréal, Ottawa, Atlantic Canada, or right on the border. From a hooping family that had a satellite dish; stayed up late watching games from the west coast. She started for a city-champion high school team, her parents were teacher-coaches who met volunteering at the basketball venues at the 1976 Montréal Olympics. And they saw where it was all heading, since if you know, you know. She works for a company that does payroll services for nursing agencies, married with two children.

Rory Souviens. Jayme’s 4½-year-old son, shooting a small ball on a lowered basket.

Sweeney Screener. A projection screen with pertinent Snippets to help everyone remember what happened, the rise, the marketing, the injuries, how the 2001-02 team rallied to make the playoffs without him.

Just a sample.

Act 1: Xavier2Saviour Marketing (stage lights toggle between Xavier at his desk) Jayme in a driveway, playing with her son after picking him from school)

Xavier: Dynamic, charismatic, look at him dunk! This is the whole game now, in 10 years no one will take a shot from than 10 feet away. It’ll be like hockey, go straight to the net. Nothing else. Yeah, I shared that with Dell Curry at the shootout when his little boy was shooting 18-footers t’other day. He didn’t say anything, but gave a high-five.

Canadians right now don’t know what basketball is. Remember at the 1995 draft? We had to make sure we had info kiosks explaining ‘travelling.’ This is the guy to show it to Canadians. He can do for basketball in Canada what Gretzky did for hockey in California. Our fans need this, the reality is there was nothing here before. And we’d have to wait forever for a white Canadian to become a NBA star. Hahahah, it’s like the NHL guys telling us one day there could be a star from Phoenix, surrrrre Gary.

Screener: Shows Steve Nash’s college and national team highlights, Auston Matthews’ birth announcement. Ha, lookithisnose. Hey, childhood Steph Curry!!

Jayme: The Edmonton Varsity Grads are on line 1 … high school championships in Halifax, Vancouver, Ottawa, Montréal, Toronto have been standing-room-only since the ’70s. That does not come out of nothing. Someone was here before you came along to see how you could monetize … you know what this like, actually?

Rory (retrieving ball): Gwod analogy to Canada’s original sin, Mommy!

Xavier: And then there was the mad scramble when we realized we didn’t know the Canadian spelling for travelling? I still say it was one.

Rory (scoring another bucket): It’s twwwwwwoooo!

Xavier: And so he’s from the same college as Air Jordan, and we are about to move into the Air Canada Centre. We should call him Air Canada!!! (does a Tiger Woods-fist pump)

Jayme: Adding ‘Canada’ to the end of name of an event and/or product you are bringing in from the States. That’s original.

Rory: So’wiginal!

Essentially, Act 2 and Act 3 writes itself. Act 2 is the fall-apart. Screener should definitely have the Everything Is Fine meme with a scroll of scores from the 2001-02 season.⁴ Act 3 will be the Rawness and Coming To Terms.

Any questions? Can the whole audience do Jazz Hands? Sure, Utah was the only team he didn’t play for.⁵

So, what is the problem? What does Team Vince, and really that includes the haters, missing about another side’s hurt?

To Team Vince: How shamelessly they pandered to American stereotypes of Canada, and expected everyone to fall in line. The NBA bricked parts of the launch, and luck (and the exchange rate) were not on everyone’s side.

The outside-of-Twranna demographics might be slivers due to underpopulation. There was proof-of-concept of basketball enthusiasm across Canada. People, though, see who wants to build a win-win-win scenario and who is rent-seeking.

To Team ROC: There is being right and being nice. Firstly, it is nice to be right.

However, there were legions of fans who did need one player to latch to, and they gained appreciation for something you like. How was this overall bad? Inevitably, sports must grow.

The piece to sit with is to look at his career in terms of surviving. Carter went from being the malingerer, Wince, to the NBA career games played leader.

Time to loop this into how much growing and learning you have surely done in two decades. The nation, and a general ‘let’s all be co-conspirators’ to let the best ideas and greatest talents come out on top have supposedly come so far.

How to win-win-win …

As always, place Vince Carter in context, and do not bait. Or take it. Specific to Vince Carter, this is a rerun of the NBA’s That Aged Well! era.

The context is hellur-fraught, and it jams up the NBA star-system machinery that runs smoothly and constantly. First there must be the Transcendent Star Who Sells Basketball.

There is a postcareer, second life, the living legend. This is the inroad into nostalgia, hooks the 30-somethings into their inner child and get them to buy stuff for their children. There is a vacuum there in between Michael Jordan and LeBron James — for reasons best left alone.

Another piece of it to remember: the NBA was taking a lot of flak in those years. Every sport takes a turn. The pivot into the Bush-Cheney years meant all of a sudden there should be more (and more obvious) racially coded aggrievance. Everyone saw it. Chappelle Show sketches were a doc in real-time.

There was much handwring related to this meme about ‘losing the Red States.’ Odd when, respectively, Memphis and Oklahoma City yoinked Seattle and Vancouver. The principle of people always adjust is a play, too.

Three in the Reads…

1. Anything stated today is, metaphorically, from someone who cannot wait to read Perry King’s début book Rebound: Sports, Community, and the Inclusive City.

2. The Great Nowitzki by Thomas Pletsinger is also worth tracking down. Detailed insight into how a player can last 20 years in the NBA.

3. It is on film, but Kathleen Jayme has explored the space with basketball and sports in Vancouver. Apparently, Canada has a west coast.

That is enough for now. Please stay safe, and be kind, especially to yourself.

1. The line hockey is a game of mistakes is deflection. It is a game of dispossession, brought to you by the Canada In A Trenchcoat meme.

2. “Do It In The Playoffs,” is a hard line Michael Shure has set in media hits on Meadowlark Media. It cuts through treacle, in the short and medium term.

3. This is a two-way go on The Simpsons memes, if you are in on your Worst Instincts Setting. Maybe three. There’s Bart chiding Milhouse after the factory fell over. There is Flanders after his house was somehow the only one to be destroyed during the first recorded hurricane to hit Springfield (Lisa: “But the records only go back to 1978, when the Hall of Records was mysteriously blown away”).

4. This is the granular. Fast scroll through the 2001-02 season. With Carter, the Raptors lost 17-of-18 games. Vince Carter does not play again that season after the third week of March, and there is a salvage job to get a playoff spot.

5. Between this and the Wince: Even when defending Vince Carter, you must shoot your shot.