Dreaming In Context With USA Basketball: David Roth's Weak In Review

It's less correct to say that the United States likes to think of itself in a particular way than to say we just like to think of ourselves, full stop. There are a great many ways that the country sees itself and many of those ways contradict themselves. You know what all this looks like. The nation is swaggering and hobbled, arrogant and humiliated, dangerous in our strength and dangerous in our weakness, hopelessly divided and somehow inherently indivisible. But also and mostly the nation is a spaniel frozen in front of a mirror, half-hypnotized and half-terrified, checking every angle with that old spaniel-y pop-eyed dismay, unsure whether it is looking at itself or another, stranger spaniel whose eyes are just as wide and weird, who is twitching in parallel, and who seemingly just as upset.

There is no one answer to what America is, and there are entirely too many answers to the question of how we think of or see ourselves, or our bigger cumulative national self. It's a futile and mostly pretty silly thing even to try to figure out, which is why most of the people who even bother trying to do it are in either marketing or politics.

But I think it's reasonable to say that we are better—more empathetic and kinder and smarter—than the most ostensibly mainstream things in our culture suggest we are. Try to average our individual weirdnesses and you wind up with something that is somehow both weirder and weirdly unreflective of any of them. In any exercise in this sort of mass sentimentality, like a Presidential campaign or an Olympiad, there's a lot more reaching for a unifying thing—or, in a pinch, a dividing wedge that's wide enough at the top and sufficiently sharp at the business end—than usual. The result is not just pandering and overdetermined but abstract and, in a strange way, sad in terms of what it reflects. Whatever this maudlin, vengeful, pompous, overwrought thing being reflected back at us is or is supposed to be, it surely isn't us.

The better part of consuming culture in the ways we can consume it—in a stadium or on a couch, on TV or the radio or in a sports column with entirely too many adjectives and em-dashes in it—is learning to tune out the parts that aren't integral to the experience you're trying to have. We all learn to do this without ever really trying, just because the alternative is actually watching every excruciating commercial we see over the course of the day with your brain switched on, and that would hurt a lot. We know, without anyone ever really having to tell us, that sneakers don't have work ethics and insurance companies don't have absurdist senses of humor and that brands are not in any meaningful way like us. They will try to convince us otherwise, because that is what they do, and at this point we don't even notice that we're blowing them off. Figuratively, if also literally, we just watch something else until the good stuff comes back on.

What's missing from that incessant pitching, invariably, is a capacity for hope that runs deeper than commercial aspiration. That is, for a wish not to be rich or powerful or beautiful or immune, but simply to be different, and to experience things differently. What the Olympics sells, when it is doing its most urgent selling, is transcendent greatness, but as authentically awesome as it can be to watch Michael Phelps or Katie Ledecky or Simone Biles or Usain Bolt, it's also flat in some important ways. Athletes that great are so thoroughly different and so undeniably other that it's hard to feel much of the dynamic tension or basic give-and-take that makes caring about sports worth it. No one is going to catch Ledecky or Bolt; Biles is just so much better at the things she's the best at that she might as well be playing a different sport. It would all be just as amazing without the clock or the scoreboard, but to a certain extent it's not any more transporting than watching fireworks.

When the United States started sending Dream Teams of NBA stars to the Olympics, the idea was to deliver just that sort of experience—unblemished, shelf-stable, completely stress-free dominance that could be consumed safely by members of all relevant demographics at room temperature. The first years of the attempt did deliver that, and it honestly wasn't any more exciting to watch than it sounds. The assembled alphas famously pushed each other hard in practice, but left the most interesting stuff in those gyms; everyone else in the world just got pushed around. Since then, though, and especially after the checked-out and retrospectively predictable embarrassment of 2004, things have gotten considerably more interesting. The U.S. still wins all the time—people fret and fume and Charles Barkley does his usual intellectually supine drawling-with-intent whenever the team almost loses a game or two—but the current challenge is a more interesting one than the old non-challenge ever was.

It helps a lot that the generation headed by LeBron James is on balance more collaborative than the one that came before; it also helps, from a storytelling perspective, that the competition is so much more competitive. But the end result is that USA Basketball's teams rise and fall—if only ever fall so far—based on how well they are able to knit the best basketball players in the world into something more cohesive and coherent than that. Where the original Dream Teams could on the world in one delirious feat of bullying after another, the new ones actually have to contend with it; the competition is game enough that Team USA actually has to counterpunch.

In Rio, much of this challenge has been self-created. The team struggles to defend, individually and as a team, and contributors have lit it up and flamed out uncharacteristically. In Friday's semifinal against Spain—an 82-76 victory—the team alternated between moments of pyrotechnic brilliance—this was The DeAndre Jordan Game, and the backboards spent much of the game in a state of shuddering recovery—and standing around dazedly while Mike Krzyzewski scowled so hard his eyebrows touched. They looked like a team that could win the gold medal, but there were stretches where they also looked like a team that last year's Spurs could have beaten by eight points without even sweating much.

It probably hasn't done much for the Leadership Lines creasing Coach K's forehead, but from a basketball perspective this does make for better games, or at least more competitive ones. It also humanizes the players in some surprising ways. Because the U.S. is still stacking the roster with high-usage, high-wattage stars—the defensive and distributive struggles of this team, in Rio, once again highlight how useful it might be to have a role-knowing specialist or three on the roster—everyone is tasked with doing significantly less than what they usually do in the NBA. The ones that stand out in this context do so not just for their uncharacteristic willingness to defer—on the 2016 team, issues of deference and defense have combined to make the team's games unusually close—but for the grace with which they embrace those new roles.

Carmelo Anthony has always been the brightest example of this, and for good reason: he is so individually great, and his teams have generally been in such desperate need of that individual greatness, that he has never really been asked to do much less than everything. Broken out of that context, Melo has shown that he can do whatever's asked; he's not just a better power forward than any NBA team has ever let him be for more than a few games at a time, but he's a much better and more selfless teammate than his teammates have ever allowed him be. This year's revelation is Paul George, who has saved the team more than once off the bench. The same contextual surprise is what makes it; it's not surprising that Paul George would help a basketball team win games, because he has never done anything but that. The bracing part is watching him do it as an energetic team-oriented defender, and as a more selectively aggressive player than any NBA team will ever let him be. All these players are too great ever to be this inessential to any other team, and if they don't always take to that humbling seamlessly there is something human and compelling in watching them try to work it out.

Precisely because they are so great, there's no contextualizing the real, Biles-class, Bolt-grade superhumans of the Olympics—because no one has ever done the things that they're doing it is very easy to see them as so fundamentally different as to foreclose empathy. What the U.S. men's team shows us, in their uneasy and imperfect collaboration, is something more recognizable—an attempt to reconcile our singular selves with everyone else, to work for things we cannot win alone, and to meet with some dignity the demands of a world too busy and too big to care much about what we want from it. With the exception of 2004's suicide squad, the Dream Teams have always seemed to be having fun. The difference this time, whatever the final result of Sunday's gold medal game winds up being, is less the winning than the unmistakeable work of it. There's a richer empathy in this, and something that grounds these superhumans even as they exult in leaping clean over the startled-looking Argentine beardos in their way. They are doing the strange and unsteady and utterly vital work of becoming something bigger and brighter than simple stars, and in giving themselves to work that is bigger than their own want. It's a struggle. That's the point.

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