This is a pretty short article and worth reading in full but I'm just going to post an excerpt of the main paragraphs here for the sake of the BGOL bibliophobes:
In securing their second championship in three years, the Golden State Warriors supposedly represent the triumph of the skinny jeanification of the NBA. This is only a bad thing if you are of the knuckledragging school, preferring that the league remain a stronghold of toxic masculinity. As professional sports leagues go, it’s fair to think of the NFL as holding down the top spot in the Toxic Masculinity Power Rankings, but the NBA isn’t far behind. The telltale slang is everywhere: when a team’s play is ineffectual, coaches call players “soft.” If it’s unclear which player is a team’s emotional leader, we wonder who the “alpha” is. Having the poise and tenacity to put a game out of reach in the fourth quarter is all about “killer instinct.” Actor, podcaster, and sports gasbag Michael Rapaport used the term skinny jeanification in an April appearance on Colin Cowherd’s Fox Sports show “The Herd” as a derisive way of characterizing the league’s current climate. It seemed to be coming from a “back when men were men” nostalgia.
It’s telling that Rapaport and other talking heads like Cowherd use slim-fit pants as the operative metonym for the NBA’s supposed decline. Cowherd even invokes skinny jeans as something closely linked with “the ‘burbs”, the implication being that players willing to wear tight-fitting pants hail from less than hardscrabble backgrounds, and consequently hoop in a fashion that lacks the grit and toughness of previous eras. Real manhood is inflexibly conjoined with a particular style of hard-nosed play. The Golden State Warriors get dragged into it because, according to Cowherd, Rapaport, and others, to rely upon a finesse game is to play like a girl. [...]
The regular season coronation of Durant’s former running mate Russell Westbrook is a testament to this. While the likely 2017 NBA MVP became the first player since Oscar Robertson in 1962 to average a triple double (with 31 points, 10 rebounds, and 10 assists per game), Westbrook’s team finished the regular season as a sixth seed before being unceremoniously dismissed from the playoffs in five games. Fan narratives about the divorced All-Star duo, Durant and Westbrook, generally favored the prickly and introverted Westbrook, whose determination to “do it on his own” made him more manly and thus more admirable than the superstar teammate who abandoned him. Such narratives feminized Durant, whose shrewd departure for golder pastures was framed as a selection of flight over fight. The preponderance of #TeamWestbrook riders suggests that when you pit Americans’ obsession with winning against their obsession with the bootstrap ethos, the latter prevails in the short term. But if Golden State’s victory proves to be the beginning of a multiple championship run, those allegiances might reverse. And would it be so bad if the dominant models of masculinity start to recognize collective effort, decency, and even “niceness”? Or if the youngsters who look up to ballplayers learn that you can be you, do you, and chill your way to championships?
There’s talk that some of the Warriors have little interest in a celebratory visit to the White House. Golden State coach Steve Kerr is on record saying the occupant there is “a blowhard” who is “ill-suited to be president.” With any luck, maybe they can skinny jeanify the presidency next.
https://thebaffler.com/latest/are-warriors-less-manly-asim
In securing their second championship in three years, the Golden State Warriors supposedly represent the triumph of the skinny jeanification of the NBA. This is only a bad thing if you are of the knuckledragging school, preferring that the league remain a stronghold of toxic masculinity. As professional sports leagues go, it’s fair to think of the NFL as holding down the top spot in the Toxic Masculinity Power Rankings, but the NBA isn’t far behind. The telltale slang is everywhere: when a team’s play is ineffectual, coaches call players “soft.” If it’s unclear which player is a team’s emotional leader, we wonder who the “alpha” is. Having the poise and tenacity to put a game out of reach in the fourth quarter is all about “killer instinct.” Actor, podcaster, and sports gasbag Michael Rapaport used the term skinny jeanification in an April appearance on Colin Cowherd’s Fox Sports show “The Herd” as a derisive way of characterizing the league’s current climate. It seemed to be coming from a “back when men were men” nostalgia.
It’s telling that Rapaport and other talking heads like Cowherd use slim-fit pants as the operative metonym for the NBA’s supposed decline. Cowherd even invokes skinny jeans as something closely linked with “the ‘burbs”, the implication being that players willing to wear tight-fitting pants hail from less than hardscrabble backgrounds, and consequently hoop in a fashion that lacks the grit and toughness of previous eras. Real manhood is inflexibly conjoined with a particular style of hard-nosed play. The Golden State Warriors get dragged into it because, according to Cowherd, Rapaport, and others, to rely upon a finesse game is to play like a girl. [...]
The regular season coronation of Durant’s former running mate Russell Westbrook is a testament to this. While the likely 2017 NBA MVP became the first player since Oscar Robertson in 1962 to average a triple double (with 31 points, 10 rebounds, and 10 assists per game), Westbrook’s team finished the regular season as a sixth seed before being unceremoniously dismissed from the playoffs in five games. Fan narratives about the divorced All-Star duo, Durant and Westbrook, generally favored the prickly and introverted Westbrook, whose determination to “do it on his own” made him more manly and thus more admirable than the superstar teammate who abandoned him. Such narratives feminized Durant, whose shrewd departure for golder pastures was framed as a selection of flight over fight. The preponderance of #TeamWestbrook riders suggests that when you pit Americans’ obsession with winning against their obsession with the bootstrap ethos, the latter prevails in the short term. But if Golden State’s victory proves to be the beginning of a multiple championship run, those allegiances might reverse. And would it be so bad if the dominant models of masculinity start to recognize collective effort, decency, and even “niceness”? Or if the youngsters who look up to ballplayers learn that you can be you, do you, and chill your way to championships?
There’s talk that some of the Warriors have little interest in a celebratory visit to the White House. Golden State coach Steve Kerr is on record saying the occupant there is “a blowhard” who is “ill-suited to be president.” With any luck, maybe they can skinny jeanify the presidency next.
https://thebaffler.com/latest/are-warriors-less-manly-asim
