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What We Talk About When We Talk About LoveUCLA's Kevin Love isn't who the basketball pundits want him to be.

By Tommy Craggs
Posted Friday, April 4, 2008, at 4:03 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

Nevertheless, he has found himself caught up in basketball's deathless culture war, in which the game is always facing down some phony existential crisis and which is related, as often as not, to the fell plague of playground basketball. This became an inevitability the moment Love committed to UCLA, John Wooden's UCLA, Congregation for the Doctrine of the Fundamentals.

ESPN.com's Bill Simmons stumbled into this briar patch a year ago with a particularly thickheaded blog entry comparing Love to his fellow incoming freshman O.J. Mayo, bound for USC. Mayo, alone on a breakaway at the end of his last game as a high schooler, had tossed himself an alley-oop, windmilled the ball through the hoop, then grabbed it and flung it toward the upper concourses—not the most graceful of swan songs but the sort of thing we might expect from an overstimulated teenager. The basketball punditocracy, however, saw a chance to dispense a lesson about good and evil. "[Kevin] Love," Simmons wrote, under the headline "Down with the O.J. Mayo Era," "represents everything good about basketball (unselfishness, teamwork, professionalism) and Mayo represents everything we've come to despise (showboating, selfishness, over-hype)." The post was a call to arms for those fans who "give a crap about basketball and care about where it's headed as a sport." (Leave aside the fact that Mayo and Love see themselves as friends and kindred spirits.)

This is nothing new. As far back as 1965, writers were seeking out antidotes to the flashy players of the day, those punks who ruined a generation of children by dribbling through their legs. That year, John McPhee wrote of Bradley: "He dislikes flamboyance, and, unlike some of basketball's greatest stars, has apparently never made a move merely to attract to attention. While some players are eccentric in their shooting, his shots, with only occasional exceptions, are straight-forward and unexaggerated."

Ultimately, Love defies the efforts of the reactionaries to turn him into some neutered mascot for the Fundamentals. He has plenty of the playground in him, too—the flair, the instinct to toy with an opponent, to humiliate him. Charles P. Pierce has written brilliantly about the game's two psychic strands, the Fundamentals and the schoolyard notion of Face, both of which share a home in Love's suddenly famous outlet pass (which he perfected, according to one account, by practicing an old Unseld trick—grabbing a carom off one backboard, spinning in midair, and throwing the ball off the opposite backboard). "You'll see me laughing on the court sometimes this year," Love told Sports Illustrated last November. "It's funny to me. I'm almost playing a game with them."

With that in mind, then, here is my shining moment, at least for the nonce: During a shootaround before UCLA's Tournament opener, cameras caught Love throwing long chest passes toward the rim, first from halfcourt, then from three-quarters court, then from the opposite base line. He was showboating, sure, but with impeccable form, just as Clair Bee might've instructed—ball at the sternum, a push off the back foot, a flick of the wrist. All three times, the ball rattled, improbably, through the hoop. And what he did next was distinctly flamboyant and exaggerated and anything but old-school (whatever that means). He faced the stadium's empty seats and took two showman's bows.

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Tommy Craggs is a writer in New York.
Photograph of Kevin Love by Ronald Martinez/Getty Images.
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