Sports Celebrations Have Become Nostalgia Cosplay
After the Boston Celtics won the N.B.A. Finals last month — defeating the miserable-looking Dallas Mavericks in a gentleman’s sweep, four games to one — the star forward Jayson Tatum made his way to the sidelines for a postgame interview with the veteran reporter Lisa Salters. Wearing a backward N.B.A. Champion cap on his head and wiping his face with a towel, he listened as Salters asked: “What does it feel like to finally be a champion?”
This was not just sideline boilerplate. While the Celtics’ victory had seemed inevitable, this championship was the culmination of a nearly decade-long education in how difficult winning can be. Over those years, Tatum and his teammate Jaylen Brown became cornerstones of the Celtics franchise and pillars of the N.B.A.’s star-reliant system, but they also experienced disappointing and sometimes even humiliating defeats at the hands of the Cleveland Cavaliers, Milwaukee Bucks and Golden State Warriors — and amid all that losing, they bore the brunt of fans’ skepticism and anger.
Salters’s actual question, then, was: How does it feel, finally, to be a champion after so many false starts and fumbled opportunities? “It’s so surreal,” Tatum mumbled distractedly before staring past Salters, the reality of victory seeming to overcome him. Then he screamed: “We did it!” He tilted his head back to the rafters and belted it out again: “We did it!”
N.B.A. fans who watched the 2008 Finals between the Lakers and Celtics might have noticed an echo here. After the Celtics’ victory that year, Salter interviewed Kevin Garnett, another star with years of frustrated championship hopes behind him. Garnett, his cap pulled low over his face, seemed to have been rendered nearly nonverbal with astonishment at the win. “Man, I’m so hyped right now,” he began, before throwing his head back and screaming — as if shocked to find himself in this position — “Anything is possible!” Watching that moment in 2008, even I, a second-generation Celtics hater, had to marvel. Garnett looked truly, spontaneously possessed by an ecstatic spirit that wound its way from incoherence to poetry.
Garnett’s interview is part of a canon of celebratory N.B.A. imagery that lives on in the consciousness of fans. In 2000, Kobe Bryant supplied an iconic alley-oop to his teammate Shaquille O’Neal, who dunked it with one hand, then sprinted up the floor, mouth agape, arms raised and fingers pointing up at throngs of delirious Lakers fans. In the 2001 Finals, Allen Iverson shot a long corner two over a falling Tyronn Lue, whom he then stepped over while maintaining disdainful eye contact on his way up the court. Fans fondly recall any number of Dwyane Wade-LeBron James fast breaks — but especially the cold, needlessly savage 2010 dunk in which Wade passed the ball behind his back to a soaring James, his arms extending into a Christ pose at the exact moment James reared back for the slam, as if to say to the Milwaukee fans: Are you not entertained? More recently, Damian Lillard hit a long three over Paul George in Portland, ending that 2019 first-round series and punctuating his disrespect for George’s teammate Russell Westbrook with a curt wave goodbye.
These moments aren’t just about athletes’ physical and mental talents. They speak to the players’ aesthetic instincts, their understanding of what makes sports beautiful to watch. N.B.A. players — athletes whose faces are not hidden by helmets or masks, playing in a league that encourages them to demonstrate personality — are especially good at this. They have sharpened their perception of beauty to such a degree that they produce it instinctively, the same way that daily practice shooting 3-pointers from midcourt allows them to make the shot look effortless during a game. What we find intoxicating about a “great sports moment” isn’t simply the athletic feat, but the way it is performed.
