Re: Holley's beat

[opi@unesco.org]

IMO, Holley himself probably volunteered for the plum Florida assignment
because of the Boston winter and a general Celts-basketball burnout. Lately,
even I find myself imagining scenarios involving Nomar and the Martinez
brothers in the context of a winnable Y2K World Series,  instead of about the
Celtics. Knowing what's at stake (Celtics Pride) and being a bit of a stubborn
masochist, I usually snap out of it. There's room for both teams, at the very
least.

I really hope the Celts to turn this season around and certainly that meand
even with Pitino at the helm forever.

Having said this, I fully agree that Michael Holley is guilty of the same
hubris that every Boston Globe sportswriter seems to suffer from lately, except
that Holley hasn't nearly paid his dues like the others no matter how much they
have declined (Ryan, Shaughnessy, McDonough, McMullin etc).

Like those others, Holley allows a love-affair with his own voice to
contaminate nearly every sports topic he chooses to cover. The Globe
sportswriters behave on what seems to me to be a frankly idiotic, clueless
assumption that readers read their sports columns because of their minor
celebrity and wit, as opposed to the possibility that they wish to gleen
further usefull insights about the actual topic at hand (namely, the Boston
sports scene). This has become a self-reinforcing bad habit that almost every
columnist on the Globe has been guilty of, with the general exception of maybe
Peter Gammons (the most nerdishly enthusiastic baseball freak ever born in
America) and Ron Borges (especially when he covers the sport of boxing).

Bill Cooper and Dan Parker contribute to this list a bit in the style of
Gammons in that I doubt anyone minds hearing their substantive opinions because
whatever opinions they have are subsumed by an overwhelmingl feeling that they
share our absorption and interest in recounting or hearing the actual momentum
shifts of a basketball game and the performances of individual players. In
other words, the focus is always on the game and the players rather than
irrelevent, distracting and frankly unimpressive nuances about how clever, or
how bored, or how above-it-all the person writing the modern game happens to
feel. Have you ever heard Bill Cooper end any Celtics game summary by
pontificating on what trades the Celtics should obviously now make (in "Way
Way" Clipperdom style) or even ask why the heck he spends so many late nights
covering this team for free just for the benefit of his fellow Celtics fans? No
sir. He'll just tell us what our team's record is and when and where we play
next, in what amounts to a combination of hope and acceptance. It's a genre of
existentialism.

Michael Holley is or can be a very talented writer, plus he also has some sort
of a general social conscious which would be valuable to journalism  if he he
didn't show it off. But at the same time he really mimics the worst kind of
sour-puss, old-fogey, blowhard role models on the present Globe staff. All of
Holley's bad habits are probably further reinforced by the minor local
celebrity, quasi-loser soothsayer status conferred on him from appearances on
WEEI talk radio and the like. It used to be that the Boston Herald was strictly
second string (like the NYC Opera compared to the Met), but that's far from the
case anymore. The Globe editors really need to acknowledge how
rotten-to-the-core, hubristic and distractingly blowhard their once truly
remarkable sportswriting staff has now become.

As a fan, all I'd hope of the local Boston sportswriters is that they
demonstrate the same detailed passion and intelligence about the game as their
general readership really are capable of (Boston fans really are something
special, if you've ever lived there and tried to talk sports with the newstand
guy or a taxi driver etc). We really don't need the value-added sportswriter
cynicism because we already are adult enough to have this in abundance. The
unifying issue is that we still can't be stopped from loving the Boston
Celtics. They can tank the rest of the games this season and subsequently sign
Pitino to a 50-year extension, and I'd still love the Celtics (even "Bat Girl")
and take every game on the remaining schedule just as personally. Gaston could
fire Pitino and re-hire "Mo Lotto" Carr and you still won't ever here any true
fans switch allegiances. Just the thought of becoming a "fair weather fan"
after all the pride and racial-healing the Celtics have historically brought to
Boston is simply unthinkable.

Although by pure happenstance I watched and stored in my memory some of the
great games from the mid-70s that every Celts fans share from the Heinsohn era,
I only grew mature enough to became this retardedly obsessed with the Celts
during the 29-win season just before Larry Bird arrived. I wrote down details
of every win and loss in the back of a little notebook and practiced on a
home-made rim in my big american backyard how to grip the ball and squeeze off
shots just like Cedric Maxwell. He'd more or less squeeze out shots through his
fingertips rather than apply a convential shooting form around the hoop, in
addition to playing the available shot release angles like a veteran pool
shark. Believe it or not, I loved the McAdoo trade too, to the extent that he
was so stunningly ambidextrous and yet another fascinating example of an
effective below-the-rim post scorer. I was 14-years-old, so give me a break!

Joe

****

Kestas wrote:

> Is it a coincidence that, after his "Pitino has failed" column, Holley has
> not covered the Celtics, and was sent to Florida to cover the spring
> training? It's a question, not a charge. After all, Florida may be the plum
> assignment at this time. So, is it a punishment, a reward, simply a measure
> to keep him a safe distance from Pitino, or none of the above?