FTB poised for breakout season, literally, Part II.

10.9.2008 | 9:16 pm | FTB On the Road, Fun with Ex Warriors, Great Beards in History, Pogonophobia, The Clippers, The Warriors, The X Factor

Breakout. Emerge. Expand. Reveal. Grow. Play bigger and play better.

To clarify. We are not renouncing our status as Dubfans. To the contrary, we are and will remain avid supporters of the Bay Area’s signature professional basketball franchise. Hell, I’d buy the team in an East 14th-minute if I had the bread and Cohan was selling. But what we have had to come to grips with over the course of these past few months is that the NBA is bigger than one team. And to be a fan of basketball played at the highest level is—to some extent—to divorce oneself from the exclusive fortunes of a single franchise.

Another source of inspiration: Meschery the elder. Tom Meschery grew up in the Bay Area, went to college locally and played for the Dubs for the better part of a decade. And then he was traded to Seattle. He also coached in the ABA and CBA. Watching him now, a basketball elder in repose, something interesting becomes clear. And at least to me, it appears to be a peaceful truth. He is still rooting for the team that he played so physically for, for so long, yes. But if you ask him who his favorite players are, he says “Allen Iverson.” “Rasheed Wallace.” First and foremost, he is a fan, a student and a teacher of the game. Of basketball. Of the Warriors and their laundry too. But mostly of basketball.

And if it so happens that the guys wearing your colors are doing the things that you like to see—on the court, as well as off of it as citizens of humanity—then you can root with unbridled abandon. When those factors collide with less regularity or on a shallower plane, then sometimes one has to break out a bit and begin looking for those things from a broader group of sources.

To wit, our namesake beard still plays his home games in California. A fantastically intriguing team is taking shape to the north in Portland. The Lakers have signed The Monkey King. Nasty Nash still has the keys to the gym in Phoenix in his pocket. And even the Sacramento Kings have myriad storylines that bear watching. All of this will now come into play. But this is only part of the equation.

Of course, since we’re not exclusively a basketball blog, having a perspective that extends some degrees beyond the geographic boundaries of the Bay Area will only serve us up with a richer mailbag from which to source good material to bounce our takes off of. The Left Coast is a place that is overflowing with the music, culture and politics that form the ballast of this site, the weight against which all things basketball are considered. And by presuming a larger service area, we do not in anyway compromise our local cred. To the contrary, we get the opportunity to consider a larger slice of the world through the lens of Fear the Beard.

For FTB our breakout season is going to be defined by this desire to embrace duality, to continue to celebrate our particular home-grown sensibilities, while applying the rancor and hubris that they create to an ever-bigger chunk of the Westside. With hoops and with life. As fans of both basketball (and its players), and as fans of the Golden State Warriors. Some stories—a great many to be sure—will be about the Warriors. Some will not. But in the end, our hope is that the breakout season that Steinmetz predicts will occur not because of unflagging allegiance to the Warriors. Rather, it will happen because we have the freedom as bloggers to step outside of defining ourselves by the fortunes of a single star or a single team. Or even a single league. We also have the freedom to simply get back to enjoying the simple beauty of basketball well played. Enjoying all of that will be salve for the wounds. But as always, we’ll be seeking out the cultural moments that reflect back through the camera obscura of our Left Coast worldview with enough clarity to warrant a post. We hope that this will prove interesting enough to keep you reading and commenting, and with a little bit of luck it will create an expanded and more-vibrant dialogue about all of the above.

In breakout,

Daniel Turman
In humble servitude of The Left-Coast Culture Blog with a High Basketball IQ

PS. Over the long days of summer—when the hoops reporting gets harder to come by and the opinions more forced and hypothetical—we often found ourselves reaching for reliable and/or entertaining sources. One such source that we found was Matt Steinmetz’s blog over at the Examiner dot com. Matt has become a truly capable sideline reporter, but I have to say I was genuinely surprised by the opinionated nature of his commentary and his genuine willingness to be critical. Over the summer we have come to value his character as much as his opinions, both of which have proven to be ever more important as we cover the team that we love and/or look beyond it for inspiration. That, and we like Rodney Stuckey.