Darnell Swallow? I bet he does.

Repeatedly, I have commented about the television coverage that the NBA receives in this, the most fabulous of countries, my homeland, and the place I reside in while I write this: England. For those who thankfully missed previous rants, one game a week is screened on a Tuesday night on a free-to-air channel called Five, and that's all we get. It's not presented very well, either.

I have yet to offer glimpses into what I'm talking about for those who have never seen the coverage in question, partly due to my laziness in recording a video, and partly because a typical Mark Webster question transcribes roughly as "well see, this is the thing, isn't it, because you know, he's, err, he's, he's, err, err, y'know, he is THE MAN, and y'know, he's going to make them do things his way, y'know, just going about their business, aren't they? That's right", which isn't good blog material. But I've ranted anyway because it annoys me. And now I'm going to do it again.

What bothers me the most about the coverage - moreso than Webster's stammer, moreso than Andre Alleyne's less than insightful insights into the NBA, and moreso than the forced chemistry and bad laughter that permeates everything they say - is the channel's dedication to only promoting the sport towards a black market. Be it through crappy pre-game advertisements, or by only interviewing black people, Five somehow ensure that Mark Webster is your only dose of vanilla for the night.

That is, except for last night. Last night, they finally had a white guy. Sort of.



If this face looks familiar, it may be because you saw it before, in this blog post. This is the impossibly named Darnell Swallow, an Albino black guy and former drug dealer, who found his fame and fortune as a Big Brother contestant. Not, as you might have thought, as an expert NBA analyst. But apparently that's not important to whether you get a job promoting the NBA or not. Nope. Not in Britain. Not when Five are involved.

At some point, I will turn this constant complaining into a hopefully-read letter of complaint to the TV channel in question, in doing so hopefully sparking a chain of rebellious events that sees the current regime overthrown and a new militant republic taking charge, leading the people to a promised land of analysis, insight and telestrators. But for now I'll just piss and whinge in this blog.

(Congratulations to Darnell, by the way, who has somehow turned a shady past and congenital skin defect into a television career that sees him feature in sporting broadcasts that he's dangerously underqualified for. That takes some doing. Actually, wait, what am I saying? He's not underqualified at all. He's black and has an American accent. He must LOVE basketball.)


Also, on a completely unrelated note, last night I dreamt that Allen Iverson sent me a text message containing a joke about Hitler, and that former Sacramento Kings summer league participant Patrick Sanders berated me at knifepoint about some gossip I had written in this blog that told about how he once shared a bed with Milwaukee Bucks guard, Luke Ridnour (which, I should stress for legal reasons, is something that never happened. Or if it did, it's a coincidence.) I just wanted to tell someone this. It worried me.

I think I need some therapy.

God Bless America

All those who read my diary type thingy from last year's preseason game in London will notice how I have a little bit of problem with Five's marketing policy of the sport, which seems to want to solely appeal to the "hip hop" (which you can probably go ahead and change to "young black") market. Of the ten courtside interviews conducted that day (Brian Scalabrine excluded), all ten were of black celebrities, this coming immediately after an advertising campaign exclusively focused on the street demographic. (If that last sentence wasn't enough of a clue, I'm white. Bravo, top hole, jolly good chap, rather bracing, tea and scones, "I say Biggles, how awfully uncouth", et cetera. Basically I'm from a Battle Of Britain war film.)

Apparently my opinion fell on deaf ears, though. This may have been my faultWhy Five Suck for never actually voicing it to anyone other than your powerless selves, but still. I was right, and changes needed to be made.

They weren't.



Right now, our national team is making the headlines, and actually becoming significant on the world stage. With Luol Deng, Pops Mensah-Bonsu, Joel Freeland, Dan Clark, Nate Reinking and (hopefully) Ben Gordon in our team now, amongst others, we finally have a side worth knowing about in Europe, and we've recently qualified for the European Championships, after only recently being so bad of a basketball nation that we were ranked behind Chinese Taipei in the world rankings. In addition to this, the NBA apparently loves us and our swanky new arena, resulting in the rare but special sight of an annual proper NBA game played in this country. (Note to other countries out there: if you build a spectacularly pointless dome shaped building to "celebrate" the new Millennium, then after you flush millions of pounds down the shitter as it struggles to be financially viable for the one year of its existence, it eventually becomes worthwhile when you completely rebuild and re-design it into something entirely different to what it was before! FISCAL FINANCIAL PLANNING FTW!). For the first time since I've been alive, and for the first time perhaps ever, basketball has a modiocum of significance in this country.

And who do we get to bring the sport to the general public? Why, it's only the blackest fifty one year old white man in rural Lowestoft, Tim bloody Westwood.

Just not good enough, is it?.

Try a bit harder next time. Find someone who knows something about the game, rather than vapid "celebrity" interviews of people who pretend to love the game but only when doing so gets them free airtime. Try and blag some interviews with the NBA people on show, or even with some of the American press sent to cover the game. Fuck it, interview me. I scrub up all right in a tie, and I actually know proper English words and stuff about basketball and stuff. I also don't gesticulate with my hands like a crack addled twat, and pensioners love me. I look perhaps a bit too much like Andrew Bogut to be good TV material, but......Tim Westwood? Are you kidding me?

Can you see why we might not have the biggest fan base for the sport in this country?

I don't care what colour they are, but let's try and get some people who know of the sport that they supposedly "love". Maybe the broadcast could then be used to relay some interesting facts, snippets or insights into the game. And then maybe it could be used to inform and entertain the public. You know, like they did back in the olden days.

It's just a theory. Feel free to ignore it again.