The toughness of contemporary NBA players seems to be the topic de jure for older NBA fans and older players alike. Paul Pierce recently maligned the current generation’s lack of toughness and puts part of the onus on video games. Charles Barkley thinks today’s teams are “girly.” Some diehard fans born before 1980 miss hand checking, ugly, sub-80 point playoff games where both teams shoot under 40 percent, and players who patrolled themselves through pugilism rather than any reliance on professionalism or the refs.
But a piece Ric Bucher wrote for Bleacher Report a couple of years ago reveals one interesting tidbit from years past that we had to share. It highlights the different NBA eras with a story about former long-time Jazz coach, Jerry Sloan.
When Karl Malone considered wearing a neoprene sleeve on a sprained knee, Utah Jazz coach Jerry Sloan walked by and said, “You’re not going to wear that c**trag, are you?”
If you didn’t know, Sloan used the c-word more than a bloke off the Barrow, Britain block. His former player in Utah, John Amaechi, wasn’t a big fan of his often cruel use of the word, either, especially since Sloan was talking to grown men about their jobs.
Can you imagine what would happen if Sloan was overheard making that comment in today’s NBA? People would be tweeting the quote before Sloan even got done giving Malone a hard time. It would have spiraled into a think piece that completely takes Sloan’s comment out of context and offers up a referendum on white, male privilege. It would have been written by a white man, too. We all still suck, basically, but less so as the years go on.
Some might use this story as another example of a suddenly spindly league, but we just think it’s evidence we’ve gotten better. Amaechi famously announced he was gay after his playing career ended, and God forbid Sloan found out about his secret before Amaechi was ready. There would have been other c-words and it wouldn’t have been as seemingly funny as his comment to Karl.
