I have been pretty far away from basketball for a while -- there have been other things going on in my life, and it always becomes hard to watch when your team sucks and it is obviously not going to get any better for a while. So it came as a bit of a shock to me when I found out just now that freedarko is no more. I have a somewhat fraught relationship with the blog. I deeply admire its beautiful artwork, the creativity of its post subjects, and some of the many brilliant things it has done for basketball (popularizing and epitomizing the basketball blogging culture is just the most obvious). I also hated the blog at times. Mostly this was out of jealousy and a certain iconoclastic position I've always taken -- I always do the Nietzchean inversion of morals thing and determine that any given popular thing is bad precisely for the reasons its proponents think its good (mostly, this is probably just jealousy). But in addition to reasons of envy, the freedarko site has frequently offended me in aesthetic ways. The writing is mannered in a particular style that I find pretty obnoxious, lazy, and much less smart than it takes itself to be. Very frequently sentences are packed with too many ideas and, instead of appearing deep or something, they seem like the results of muddled thinking that didn't reveal anything at all. Reading this stuff was pretty frustrating. It seemed more an excuse to name drop and show of the eclecticism of its creator's interests than to inform or engage with the reader. If only they had an editor, I often opined. This sort of writing -- similar to that which can be found at pitchfork, which was brilliantly lampooned by David Cross -- seemed to represent the worst of do it yourself internet journalism: it was out of touch, masturbatory, and off putting. It exemplified, at least to me, HL Mencken's dictum that people were bad writers because they were bad thinkers (I'm not above name dropping and self congratulatory masturbation). Then there were the images: that crazy lolzcats internet aesthetic where everything is as grainy and unrelated to the article as possible, while appearing designed to leave the viewer with a feeling of queasiness and/or general disgust (we too, have not always been above this).
That stuff has annoyed me at times, but it has also made freedarko a unique website. One that really felt better suited to its medium than almost any other. The writers, particularly Shoals, in addition to annoying me with their individual sentences and ideas, were also courageous. I mean that in the highest sense it can be applied to an activity done from the safety of your own bed (note: not that courageous). They were unafraid of tackling any issue no matter how controversial or inane. And a lot of the ill-formed writing I mentioned above (articles comparing Jordan opponents to forgotten genesis games; ranking stadiums by horror film appeal; what have you) were often the result of creativity pushed as far as it would go. Writers on freedarko took on issues of real substance. I am incredibly grateful for their attempts to deal with race in the NBA, and for their insistence on challenging the received wisdom, often showing the arrogant and reactionary assumptions it was based on. These are issues that are incredibly important for anyone seriously interested in sports. And they are anathema to many major sports outlets where, much like in the NBA itself, what matters is keeping everyone happy and not upsetting the boat. Freedarko offered a break from that kind of thinking. It also offered a break from the strict confines of sports journalism, providing essays that were surprising, funny, thought provoking, and delightfully weird. It was often a romp to check out their site. I'll miss that irreverent fun.
The good news is that what freedarko started lives on in sites too numerous to count. They got in when the getting was good. They popularized blogging about basketball and forever defined what its aesthetic would look like. If I may steal a line from another faceless basketball blog, they really were the Velvet Underground of this enterprise. As long as semi-articulate, over educated people are spending too much of their time writing about basketball and giving their content away free, freedarko will live on. The joke that informs the blog's title has already come to pass: Darko is a semi-important part on an NBA team; he is freed (unless the blog was asking for Milicic to be freed from his physical imprisonment on Earth through assasination, which is pretty uncool, I think) from his former unhappiness. It's time Shoals and his coterie of writers are freed along with him; no longer fettered to the format they developed, which must have become, at least a little bit, restricting after six years, they can begin to exert their influence elsewhere. They'll go on to do bigger and better things, having left their mark on all of us who read them (I read Shoals in the Atlantic a few weeks ago, which blew my mind). This blog and many others wouldn't exist without their pioneering work, for which I want to say thanks. So... be free Darkos, go forth and prosper. I wish you the best. Thanks for the memories.
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