c/o twitter.com/smart_MS3
Sports are serious business. They’re all about legacy, identity, triumph, failure, and multi-million-dollar deals. But sports are also stupid and fun. When I was a kid, some real estate company paid the Pepsi Center (home of the Denver Nuggets, now called the Ball Arena) to do a promotional activity during TV timeouts once each game. The commentator would come onto the microphone and yell, “Ok, it’s time to shake those keys!” People would lose their minds. Everyone whipped out their keys and aggressively jangled them, hoping to get on the mega screen, a possibility so exciting for some reason that it always elicits lunatic behavior. I was ten so I didn’t even have keys, but if I did, even my mild-mannered soul would have surely been swept up in the madness. In those cold years after Carmelo Anthony left, “shake those keys” was all that crowd had.
This is the not-so-serious business of sport: an enterprise best carried out not on First Take or in the prestigious pages of “The Athletic,” but on the margins, appearing only fleetingly on Twitter. Here are a few of the best, most fun-loving images from the year that’s been.
Local broadcasts are the best. The production value is just low enough to catch things that have no business being on TV, but inadvertently give life to boring games.
Giannis Antetokounmpo is a connoisseur of fine things, Oreos among them. The best part of his mini-lecture on the sandwich cookies is that it was clearly pre-planned. This is a part of a larger genre of players with specific food passions, up there with Demba Ba’s love of strawberry syrup and Terry Rozier’s infamous spaghetti, sugar, and ranch sandwich (hot take: I think this would actually be ok if the ratios were right).
Marcus Smart is the Defensive Player of the Year, your boss’s boss, and your teacher’s teacher. This is a top-five thread about robe-wearing. One of the best I’ve ever seen. Long live the king.
Communicating with your barber is tough. I get it, but this is difficult to justify. This, too, is a part of a broader genre, featuring an analysis of Rob “Hairline” Holding’s post-hair replacement surgery performances and the stunning density of Mikel Arteta’s Lego-like follicles.
Sometimes obscure images and videos convey a truth that records and stat lines cannot. This is Manchester United’s last five years as a club in a nutshell.
After a bumpy few years, Jason Kidd has proven himself to be a good NBA coach. Wearing shirts with giant collars, however, is a rookie mistake. You expose yourself to too much potential mockery. People who make threads like this are really doing the people’s work.
Sam Sheehan (for hire) is an NBA reporter who believes himself to be a frontline worker and is concerned about the fall of American values. He spent his entire career learning in unpaid internships, can’t report anything out of respect for HIPAA, and lost the right to see his child after a failed visit to family court. It’s a parody account and a must-follow.
Magic Johnson is an icon, a transformative player with an all-time great basketball intellect. That’s what makes his Twitter so strange. He just states facts and statistics with zero insight and a matter-of-fact tone. There are legitimately toxic presences in sports media. Magic isn’t one of them. His endgame remains a mystery to us. Who is this possibly for?!
One of the joys of my life will be watching Deuce Tatum (son of Jayson) grow up. He is simultaneously the largest and most media-savvy four-year-old to ever exist. Bronny James is of no interest to me. In an era of sports celebrating police (let Pat Bev express himself), it’s worthwhile to pause every once in a while to stop worrying and just enjoy sports Twitter for what it is. Embrace the fun. Joke about and fall in love with the idiosyncrasies of players. Shake those keys.
Will Slater can be reached at wslater@wesleyan.edu.