Tim Duncan, All The Way Down To Earth: David Roth's Weak In Review

There's a picture of a very casually dressed Tim Duncan that circulated in the days after his retirement that I keep thinking about. It's probably more accurate to say "in the days after which his retirement was announced"—only an extreme feat of the passive voice will do, here, as Duncan himself didn't even issue a statement until two days later. It's definitely important to name the picture, too, because social media was suddenly, torrentially awash in images of Duncan wearing his signature husky-cut culottes and no-color bowling shirts once his retirement was announced. This was a sort of tribute, too, as anyone that ever cared about the NBA seized upon the opportunity to drop one last what-are-those on the most style-averse superstar athlete of his era; when Enes Kanter, a man whose personal aesthetic could be described as Henchman Who Gets Kicked Through A Window In An Early Van Damme Movie, is getting in on the joke, something more than consensus has been achieved.

But right: about this picture. Duncan is sitting on a stool, with David Stern—looking, as ever, like an elf who has someplace else to be—on his left and Spurs owner Peter Holt on his right. Holt is wearing a teal-ish golf shirt and a blazer and a pair of microfiber khakis that he has pulled up such that they rest right around the middle third of his ribcage; the fly on those pants appears to be a sensible 22 inches in length. This is worth mentioning only because Holt is not the most strangely dressed person in the photo. That would be its star, the man on the stool holding the NBA's Most Valuable Player trophy, smiling wanly in a girthy red t-shirt and a pair of crisply pressed denim shorts. These special-occasion jorts extend below Duncan's knees, but still leave a long expanse of leg running down to the bottom of the shot, and Duncan's sandaled feet.

Depending upon how you choose to look at it, this image could mean any number of things. Maybe you see an athlete so averse to pretense that, even when he knows that he's going to be photographed with the major award he just won, he cannot be bothered to put on long pants. Maybe you are fixated on the baffling length of the fly on Holt's pants, which is really honestly your business, in the end, and not for any of us to judge. Or, and this is our darkest and sharpest angle: maybe you see someone who is being given a deservedly hallowed award—the one given, one time each year, to the best player in the best basketball league on earth—and disrespectfully decided to show up for that occasion dressed like an eighth grader headed to Six Flags. It's clear from the photo that Tim Duncan does not really care much about how he looks. There's just more than one way to read it.

Whichever way, you'd be guessing, which is always how it works when it comes to things like this. When a player is playing, we can watch that and know that we're watching the same thing that everyone else is watching. But that's about where the unanimity ends. The game is the game, and give or take an aesthetic quibble or partisan interest it is mostly what it is, but also none of us watch any of this from quite the same perspective, and so none of us see quite the same thing. Everyone that watched basketball over the past couple of decades agrees that Tim Duncan is a sublimely, uncannily, uniquely great basketball player; many of them, including the person typing these words, think he has a claim on being the best ever to play his position. It's when it comes to what he means—or where he fits, or who he passively negates or surpasses through his pure and poker-faced Tim Duncan-ness—that things get complicated.

"Tim, we're doing the MVP photoshoot tomorrow. Please dress up."
"No problem." pic.twitter.com/A9LZPApDY4
— Zach Harper (@talkhoops) July 11, 2016

Or, in this case, they mostly don't. There is nothing inherently complicated about Tim Duncan the basketball player, and his metronomic excellence makes it more difficult to use him as an avatar, positive or negative, in the way that NBA fans tend to use superstars. The fervid weirdos that really believe in Kobe Bryant are subscribing to a worldview; in his blinkered maximalism and relentless total war approach to everything, they see, somehow, a winning way to be. There is something similar echoing around in the community of salty squeakers dedicated to proving LeBron James' fraudulence, the same sort of suspicious and hilariously wayward anti-elite impulse that gets people heated about chemtrails. To pledge allegiance to Russell Westbrook is to align yourself with a ragefully romantic vision of basketball that is both supremely expressive and doomed. There's a fundamental fuck-you in the way Westbrook plays that is a challenge to the nostrum that individuals must embrace or at least acknowledge broader systems; in a team sport, and really in everything else, this is undeniably true. It's also kind of a drag. Which brings us back to Duncan, who we understand or misunderstand as the ultimate system superstar, and who carries a different sort of symbolic baggage.

With the exception of the emotional tributes that Duncan received from lifelong Spurs fans like Shea Serrano and Graydon Gordian, much of the way he was celebrated involved what Duncan was not, or didn't do, or the ways in which he was otherwise unlike the typical NBA star. "No self-promotion. No tantrums. No feuds. No entourage. Nothing but class," were the sentence fragments Skip Bayless saw fit to dedicate to Duncan before concluding, with suitable reverence and that inimitable Baylessian flubbiness, "Pure grestness."

It's unfair to base any critique of anything on a Skip Bayless take, except for maybe a critique of how impossibly shitty and shot-through with dogwhistling creepery sports cable's macro-pundit conversation is. But there is, in this and in the many less crudely Baylessian glosses on Duncan's greatness, something that's even more unfair to Duncan. Propping him up as The Superstar Basketball Player For People Who Dislike Basketball Players is point-missing, ham-headed pandering, and as such fits squarely within Bayless' job description, which is sports talk for people who dislike sports. But it also overlooks the actual basketball work Duncan did, and the real if understated transcendence buried within that work. It's not just that praising Duncan as a sort of anti-basketball-player is stupid, it's that it leaves out the most interesting stuff.

The biggest reason that Duncan's greatness was so easy to minimize or miss was how relentlessly in-context it was. The best game I saw Duncan play, which is also one of the best games I've ever seen anyone have in the NBA Finals, was his 21/20/10 triple-double, with eight blocked shots, in the clinching Game 6 of the 2003 NBA Finals against the New Jersey Nets. There is no denying the bulk of all those numbers, but what I remember about watching Duncan implacably ease the Nets into the offseason was less about accumulation than erasure. One steady moment after another, non-mistake by non-mistake, Duncan just unmade the Nets.

That he did it with the poker-faced focus of a half-stoned teenager working on a Rubik's Cube matters, I guess, if you want it to matter. He didn't yell or thump his chest, and if you are the sort of NBA fan who is put off by that you doubtless found that very refreshing indeed. But the awe in it, and what was memorable about how Duncan did what he did, was in the all-consuming reason of how he went about doing it. the That Nets team was powered by Jason Kidd's creativity and Kenyon Martin's vehemence; these were inelegant times in the Eastern Conference, but Kidd's orchestration channeled the old Eastern Conference violence in startling ways, urging it upwards and outwards. They built a fourth-quarter lead playing like that, and then Duncan just shushed them. Martin attacked the rim and Duncan found an angle and timed his jump and made it all look so foolish; the Nets swarmed Duncan and he passed the ball into the spaces on the floor they'd just surged away from. Martin made three of 23 shots in the game, and the Spurs outscored the Nets 31-14 in the fourth quarter. I am not without a rooting interest in all this, I should admit, but the feeling of watching Duncan's airtight and irrefutable disproof of magic was the saddest I've been as a basketball fan.

At the time, I believed certain things that I don't really believe anymore, about how basketball should be played but also about bigger things. None of them, I thought, had much to do with what Duncan was doing. I wanted my basketball to reflect my life, or something, but mostly what I wanted to see was the ugly and ungovernable stuff roiling and raging inside me turned outwards and made beautiful; I wanted to see a specific type of unreason redeemed, and I had a lot riding on that, and I put much of this on the Nets. In Duncan's refutation of that Nets team, I saw the opposite of everything I felt—cool mastery instead of struggle, a certain corporate submission instead of defiance. Duncan was still young, then, but I saw him, mostly, as not just someone who was old, but as emblematic of the whole stupid compromising business of getting old. He won, sure, but in the same attritive and fundamentally negative way that erosion wins.

This, much more than my youthful loathing for the retrospectively kind of loathsome Michael Jordan, is one of my big regrets as someone who cares about basketball, and a reason why I'm glad that Duncan and the Spurs stayed as brilliant as they did for as long as they did. My appreciation for Duncan and the team he came to define was aided, I'm sure, by the fact that I got old right alongside them; in the same way that I had much of myself invested in the impossible outgunned struggle of the stupid basketball team of my youth, I am invested in the redemptive power of the Spurs' radical synthesis and graceful change as I sit here creaking through my 30s. Some foolishnesses we outgrow more quickly than others. But also, and more than the old fan-transference issues, there's the fact that I was finally able to see the Spurs, and Duncan, once they stopped disproving the team in which I'd so heedlessly over-invested.

Here is what I saw in Duncan, at his prime and at the end, when he summoned a few great minutes against the Oklahoma City Thunder before his team lost in the Western Conference Semifinals a few months ago. I saw a player who did not want to win any less madly than his peers—who was, in fact, insane with that want—but who chose to do something different with it. Instead of simply smashing it against the world, over and over, he looked for the spaces into which it fit most helpfully; he found the actions that helped him most, and he did them over and over again; he entrusted his individual talents to a generous system that was worthy of them. And in doing this, Duncan got everything that he wanted and shared it. At the moment when I hated him and what I believed he stood for, it never occurred to me that it was possible to have both.

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