Dancing With Noah

The turnover king, the turnover king,
Let’s not say long live the turnover king
He’s fallen in a heap of basketballs made of butter that don’t bounce but splat with buttery densities
His pockets picked clean like the dreams of a drunk passed out on the BART with destination of summer
The turnover king, you turnover king
Thirteen times you gave it away
Those 27 points that were nothing but average all year long
were unattainable,
A single point over half of average which is 14 total which is underwhelming when cities and states depend on you
Average was out of reach like the extra virgin olive oil-covered leather ball that betrayed you on a Wednesday night in May
Those seven assists you casually deliver with just a hair more than the effort I put into catching my morning bus or walking my morning dog
Were as fleeting as an acceptable assist-to-turnover ratio:
Yours was 1 to 2.1666666666667 tonight
(or something, could be there are too many or too few sixes)
But it doesn’t matter
The great turnover king, the turnover king
Exists in multispheres like this:
In my eye as a fan of trivial NBA history
In his eye as a human being trying to achieve something – such as a completed pass to a teammate
In the eyes of his opponents as a brown skinned equation that is a basketball version of the unsolvable, yet only if said equation collapsed on itself leaving mathematician
basketball opponents like, “Oh shit, the math did itself”
Historically bad is still historical you gnarled sweating
Turnover king
I swear to god if this was 1215 instead of 2015, probably the bards and songwriters would write about the turnover king with the amount of sadness on par with the amount of joy they write about the
Three point king or reverence with which they write about the regular king
Unnaturally bearded children would bury their heads in the bosoms of consoling mothers
While sober former players would chalk it up a bad game, shaking their heads shrugging massive suit-covered shoulders and reminisce on their own pimple covered failures in uglier-than-reality embellished memories
And in the sphere of emotional existence, do we not recall our scars as much if not more than our jubilations?
Oh you fucking immortal turnover king with all those errant passes and over dribbles
Are you mad man?
We know you’re not, you filthy turnover king
You just had a bad day like that time I stepped in dog shit with no shoes on before high school and nasty stuff in my toe nails and cuticles
Or that time I forgot my laptop even though my entire existence as a professional hinges to varying degrees around my laptop
Turnover king, I’ve never coughed up 13 turnovers, but I feel you
Or not, you know?
Dear turnover king, like that section in the US Weekly magazines my wife reads, I know you’re a star but you’re just like us – you have bad days
I know this because you had the worst fucking day possible short of a game-flushing timeout called when you didn’t have any timeouts like Chris Webber way back in the day
And I (and the people I know) have had shitty days
Oh sloppy turnover king, were you unfocused, distracted? Did you forget yourself?
I doubt it.
My friend thought you looked like Sidney Dean throwing that game in Watts with Billy Hoyle and who am I to argue even if I don’t agree
I don’t believe you threw the game but if you’d been wearing that Colnago cap with the bill flipped, then maybe
Suffice to say, not even turnover kings are immune to storylines and narrative
Someday turnover king, someday when you’re vanquishing the physical foes of the present, they’ll bring this up in the same way
Gatorade and Adidas and their chummy ad agencies with their truckloads of demographic audience data build storylines around bouncing back and overcoming failure
There’s no good that will come out of this, you gone fishing turnover king, but in our endless quest to attach meaning to every inconceivable
Mishap that befalls us, someone, perhaps you yourself, will invent the silver lining to create achievement out of failure
Like a technicolor flower sprouting out of the ugliness of a desolate wasteland
Whatever turnover king, just let’s take better care of that which we covet next time