Have you. Have you seen. https://x.com/roommates__show/status/2068499368211091838?s=46&t=BI8mzuOdv9X39pg4g_Nn8g
I HAVE… I’M GONNA UPLOAD IT WHEN THEY RELEASE THE FULL VIDEO
like okay. brief sidebar into Jalen And His Dad. i really feel like the key to the whole Rick-Jalen Situation is not the video in which he’s running over the blacktop and rick is shouting at him—like, i pay a lot of attention to jalen and his mom saying “we were constantly checking in to see if he was being pushed to do something he didn’t actually want to do, and he kept committing, he kept saying no, this is what i want to do with my life”
but i feel like what i see that in the light of (& why i feel like “no he wanted to pursue this!!” is not, like, a comforting answer to the question “was all of this psychologically healthy”) is jalen talking about the day his dad got cut from philadelphia and from the nba as a whole, how he cried on the car ride home, and how that was the worst day of his life
and i always feel like in the ways our parents fuck us up, it is lost sometimes that they fuck us up because we spend the rest of our lives trying to save them, just as much as we spend the rest of our lives trying to save our inner children, sometimes more. we do things because we need to feel safe or we need to feel loved or we need to protect our egos or we need to avoid shame or all these things but i think we really really discredit and overlook how much of what we do in life we do because we want the people we love to not be in pain.
I’ve seen it said that rick being on the last knicks team that made the finals, back in 99, means jalen can be framed as a sort of sleeper agent prince-who-was-promised raised from birth to take revenge. i think this is great and hilarious but it is not precisely how i would tell the story.
i’ve said before that this nba finals was a writer’s dream because it was a conflict between a person who was trying to achieve apotheosis, in wembanyama, and a group of people who were trying to do katabasis, in the knicks. (you do have to bear with me on this kind of thing. this is my real personality and i cannot seem to create another one.)
it was just two years after the knicks’ last championship that the post dropped the headline FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD. also there’s what desus said to pablo torre, which i’m not gonna repeat but which i also take seriously. it’s easy to go to hell; the gates are open night and day. to return your people to escape above into the free air, that is real labor, that is the great work.
jalen doesn’t know this, but in the aeneid, when aeneas goes to hell and meets his father there, he tries to embrace him three times, and every time his arms go through his father like a breeze or a dream. mayor mamdani talks about knicks fans watching and waiting for fifty-three years with people who they did not get to share this championship with. it’s in this context i think abt jalen breaking down when his father hugs him.
anyway. all this to say. well, obviously, all this to say all of this, but also to say that jalen following that up by saying that hearing josh’s voice in his ear while he was crying was just as important as that moment with his father makes me feel deranged
