Wesley Morris on LeBron, Dwyane, Amar'e, and the rise of the NBA nerd - Grantland →
An interesting look at Basketball Nerd style and black culture.
Includes this great aside:
“All the interesting comic tension of the show was in how long it would take until Will got Carlton to do something black. How long until he, say, wore a track suit or stopped dancing like Belinda Carlisle and started doing the running man. This, of course, is also what people spent Sammy Davis Jr.’s entire career hoping they’d see, that he’d replace the skin he’d seemed to shed, that he would change back. The tragedy of Davis is the triumph of Carlton: Neither did. You know who changed on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air? Will. Carlton got Will educated, enlightened, prep-schooled, and blazered. It’s only a mild overstatement to say that Carlton changed us, too.”
