Something Worse
It would have been a storybook ending: a Pacers title on the anniversary of the day the Pacers drafted Reggie Miller. Instead, another addition to the Pacers’ Stations of the Cross.
To love sports is to voluntarily sign up for years of suffering, years of heartbreak, years of disappointment. Without exception. Unless you’re a Lakers or Yankees fan. Those fanbases were born on third base. Those fans have sky-high expectations so anything short of a title is bound to disappoint them.
And while they have had their fallow periods, it’s hard to ever feel sorry for any suffering those teams might experience. Most of those fans have had one or more titles in their lifetimes. And if not, they’ll happily remind you of how many their team has and how few yours has.
A title is still a title, but on some level they know some theirs are cheaply bought, have an asterisk attached to it, or they mean less merely because they root for a historically successful franchise. I’m sure Lakers fans are happy about 2020, but on some level all the jokes about it being Mickey Mouse has to eat at them. “On some level,” grumbled the fox, sore at the grapes out of his reach.
You could point out things like the insane free-throw differential the Lakers recently enjoyed or some questionable officiating against the Kings in the first decade of the new century, but those are all sour grapes, but there’s some satisfaction in knowing they are pebbles in the shoes.
And Luka trade aside, generally the type of fake trades you see on social media never pan out. Then they whine about the Lakers tax. In reality, what trade assets they have typically offer little value. Unless a team is tearing it all down.
Even then, Lakers draft picks tend not to be super valuable, they rarely bottom out and tend to retool and rebuild quickly. Which is why it’s so funny to see Lakers fans talk about how tortured they are as a team. I am 36 and they have won six titles in my lifetime, so roughly one title every six years. They could never handle being a Pacers fan just as I could never handle being a Kings fan.
Los Angeles alone is a great recruiter for players. And the role players they want to be rid of aren’t necessarily the kind of supporting cast you want for contending. Best used for leading the tank by eating up minutes and piling up losses.
And there’s the other side of the Lakers and their fanbase having the characteristics of fascism. That’s mostly tongue-in-cheek, but there’s a grain of truth to that.
Consider the mock trades their fans have put together for years. They often involve them trading a doorstop for a Danish. And they’ve been empowered by the trade Nico Harrison made in February. I’m not even a Mavericks fan and I was calling for someone to serve out extrajudicial justice for that managerial malpractice.
If they land a major star in a trade, some level of incompetence is involved, theirs or their trading partner. And maybe the League sweetens the pot for the team receiving a door stop with the number one pick. It happened for the Pelicans after they shipped off Anthony Davis and it happened for the Mavs after they practically gave away Luka.
It won’t happen for the Pacers in spite of the most gut-wrenching injury possible at the most gut-wrenching moment possible. Silver visited the locker room after the Finals in the way a criminal returns to the scene of the crime.
They blew the fourth quarter of Game 4, but it’s hard not to wonder about the role of Scott Foster. Never a good sign when you know an officials name. Maybe with a different ref, they blow that game still.
Maybe they don’t. Maybe they win it and then win it all at home in game 6. Matching the mark set by Reggie a quarter of a century before but surpassing it another way. Maybe Haliburton’s Achilles doesn’t tear and they ink Myles Turner to a contract that likely means he retires in blue and gold. A game 7 loss without that horrible injury means they stay the course.
There’s always next year. Maybe they have what they need or they’re a player away. East is wide open. There’s reasons to be optimistic that this won’t be a sad footnote. An end to an era.
Instead, the season is lost. And so is the one after that. And probably the next. The title window didn’t shut. It was nailed close along with every door. Carbon monoxide is filling the room and falling asleep seems like the best option on the table.
Maybe the team gets broken up and they finally tank and up the odds of a true game-changer. Maybe they’ll finally get a number one pick.
In all likelihood, it would be another froze envelope situation. Some other sad-sack franchise that plays ball and helps out another large market darling gets rewarded.
The Pacers aren’t supposed to be there. They were t supposed to be in the Finals. They aren’t even supposed to be in the league. Which is why they and the other three ABA teams were only accepted in the league under conditions so punitive the team nearly folded from insolvency.
The league will take your money but they’ll resent you every step of the way. The Pacers have a way of spoiling the party or coming close.
On some level, we know the game is rigged. We just don’t like being reminded of that by things like the Mavericks miraculously winding up with the top pick or the Lakers getting a LeBron replacement before they go on sale.
The path of the frozen envelope leads to madness. My only conspiracy is that David Stern hated the Pacers, but only because they were often stumbling blocks for franchises from larger markets. That’s why I believe the punishment for their role in The Brawl was much harsher than it was for Detroit. They have a Zelig-like tendency to insert themselves in key moments in NBA history.
They made Jordan to Chicago possible because they traded their pick in the 1984 draft to Portland in 1981. And they also had to rely on the incompetence of the Blazers in a stacked draft.
They have a preternatural skill for getting good the same time as an ascendant dynasty or in the middle of the run of a generational talent.
There’s an episode of The Last Dance about how much Jordan’s Bulls feared and respected them and how much they pushed them. I’m sure the documentary on LeBron will mention how much of a challenge they gave him during his Heat days and at least one year on the Cavs.
They were there as a prop for him winning the NBA Cup, then known as the In-Season Tournament. The Brawl cost not only them a title but possibly one for the Suns as well.
The new bench proximity rule for fights caused suspensions in 2007 that didn’t help the Suns’ postseason hopes.
Maybe what happened to Haliburton was karmic repayment for that. Some view him as the second-coming of Steve Nash because of the way he plays and shoots. There’s some of that in his game. And Chris Paul, because of the way he protects the ball and sees the floor. And Reggie Miller, in his trash talk and his idiosyncratic shot.
They were the hurdle the Lakers overcame for their first title with Shaq and Kobe. And now they filled that purpose for the Thunder.
Some are touting that as their first title period, though merchandise treats it as their second after that title nearly 50 years ago when they were still the Seattle SuperSonics.
A hard pill to swallow that the Sonics no longer exist but that title counts for them. The Pacers have been around since 1967 but their three ABA titles aren’t worth a thing. Much like their NBA career, the best they can manage is praise.
They were never treated as a realistic team to win a title or to make it beyond the first round or so. “A tough out,” is the best the national media can muster. Because they don’t give a damn about this franchise and they don’t watch their games.
One preview of the NBA Finals compares them to Rick Carlisle’s Dallas team that shocked the Heat in 2011 because they both shot a lot of threes. Pacers relied on a midrange game in which they were highly accurate. They didn’t shoot many threes but were pretty accurate when they took them.
Commentators were so focused on on fitting them into molds of the past: the 1995 Rockets, the 2011 Mavericks, or the 2016 Cavaliers, that they couldn’t accept the Pacers as something unique, something very much their own.
Tyrese Haliburton said something to the effect that no other team plays like them. The closest analog to them might be the 2014 Spurs, for the way they passed. But these Pacers were their own thing, an invigorating and resilient team, that seemed to channel some otherworldly force, and had destiny on its side. Until it didn’t.
Those dreams of an all-time dream season snapped were torn asunder along with Tyrese Haliburton’s Achilles. Something I’d been afraid of saying or writing for fear of bringing it into existence. The calf strain had me on edge due to memories of Kevin Durant in 2019. It happened and it turned a dream into something worse: another what if?
“Now those memories come back to haunt me
They haunt me like a curse
Is a dream a lie if it don't come true
Or is it something worse” - Bruce Springsteen, “The River”
I fully believe that if Haliburton doesn’t go down, they win that game. He was determined to win it all. Under the face masked in agony and the floor slaps, was a pain that went beyond physical.
He knew he was done and that title was out of reach. He had given his all and risked everything to find himself near yet so far away. The third player on his team this season. The third in playoffs.
Nearly half of the eight players overall to go down with that injury. Symmetry beginning the season with an Achilles tear to a Pacer and ending the same way.
Certain fans of the Knicks and Bucks were coming out of the woodworks on Sunday, June 22 to crow about the Pacers falling short. Any defense about injuries falls on deaf ears when the situations are reversed.
You can only play the team in front of you. Healthiest team usually wins. Luck is with you until it isn’t. And while health factored into the failures of the Bucks and Knicks against the Pacers the last two post-seasons, at a certain point you have to accept that maybe your team isn’t as good as you think it is.
If you denigrate the team that beat you, doesn’t it make your team’s loss more embarrassing?
There were even some Thunder fans who were jerks in victory. Harassing Pacers fans leaving the arena heartbroken and disappointed by the loss of two seasons: the most recent one and the next.
Trash talk is part of the game, but it seems more than a little sad not to be able to enjoy your victory without rubbing salt in the wound of the injured and vanquished. Especially when they just lost their franchise cornerstone to a career-shattering injury.
Maybe it was the anger over Game 4 and the role of Scott Foster, that made their title feel cheap? Or the number of people complaining about the way some members of the Thunder draw fouls or that the Thunder are allowed to play a very physical style while their opponents don’t necessarily get the benefit of the doubt? A shame considering they had the best record in the league and put up historically good numbers and have all the metrics of an all-time great team.
I think blaming officiating is a losing argument, but Scott Foster does have a tendency to insert himself in games and has a reputation of extending series. To say nothing of the 134 phone calls he exchanged with Tim Donaghy between October 2006 and April 2007, the period in which the disgraced ref admitted to betting on games. He called Foster more than any other ref and didn’t call any other official more than 13 times.
It has the appearance of not being on the up-and-up, which is enough to damn him, at least in the eyes of Pacers fans. He is Chris Paul’s nemesis and in many ways Haliburton is his heir apparent as the best point guard in the league. Others score more, but no one protects the ball quite like Haliburton. And that talent was really put to the test by a Thunder team that specializes in forcing turnovers..
Ultimately, they are to blame for blowing it in Game 4 and it makes you wonder if they could have won it in 6 at home and Tyrese wouldn’t have torn his Achilles and the future would seem brighter. Maybe Game 5 goes the way it did but there’s no guarantee Game 6 ends the same way.
I got pushback for saying the Pacers were a cursed team but I don’t know how you read the ending of the season any other way. A Game 7 loss would have sucked and been a disappointing ending, but to end that way with the worst possible injury to the best player puts the miracle moments in a new light. And then they lose their longest tenured player, one is who is a key part in their offense and defense.
Those moments happened precisely to increase the pain of this one. To feel destined, to have the possibility of doing so on the day Reggie Miller was drafted, 25 years after the first Finals failure and 20 years after the Brawl would have been magical. But the magic ran out and we are left with the cold comfort of what might have been.
Another year, another heartbreak. Always coming up short begins to weigh on you, and you question whether you’ll ever be good enough to reach the mountain top or if you’re destined only to be a prop in others’ stories. A means to an end.
It gets tiresome constantly playing the role of Salieri. You’re only remembered because of the roadblock you were to the one chosen by destiny. Turnus to pious Aeneas. The guy who gets left at the altar in rom-coms. Good, but not good enough. You come up short in everything: career, social life, you name it. And nothing you can do can change that.
Politics are like that now, where public opinion doesn’t influence policy. You can want no war with Iran or for your tax money not be used for killing civilians, but can’t you see boys it’s the war we need so there’s no consensus at all.
Fans want the team to do all they can to maximize chances of winning. But ownership will never commit to a tank and balk at paying the luxury tax. You are powerless and all you can think to do is give into superstitions, like a medieval peasant.
When I’m watching a game, I’ll turn it off if they’re losing in the hopes that my turning away rights the ship. I found the playoffs largely too stressful to watch because I assumed the worst outcome. I kept up with things secondhand by following the score online and through multiple group chats and only watched a handful of games.
I opted to cook during games because it gave me something to focus on and my hands were too busy for me to dwell on the score. That’s when I developed a new superstition: cooking.
During the first game of the conference finals, I watched the first half and then started making chicken cacciatore. By the time it was ready, they had won it in overtime by virtue of another miracle comeback and another lucky shot.
I cooked more during the rest of the series. They didn’t lose when I made chicken tikka masala, but they lost when I made sausage and peppers. Some of the sausages were pork and some were chicken. I chalk that up to the mixed variety.
In the Finals, they had another insane ending in game 1 while I spent hours cooking chicken paprikash. They did win when I made pasta with broccoli rabe, sausage, and beans but maybe I was given a reprieve because of Brian Wilson dying that day.
I made Philly cheesesteak from scratch during game 4 and they blew the game in the fourth quarter. Game 5 I made mujadara and they lost again. The game after that, I made sausage and peppers again. This time with all chicken. That seemed to do the trick.
For the last game of the season, I decided to make smothered chicken. Cooking chicken seemed to correlate with their success and it seemed a fitting dish to go out on because of Quinn Buckner, who serves as color commentator for the team’s broadcast.
It seemed to work. And then everything went to hell. I didn’t find out until a while later about what happened. I was busy with my prep work and my hands were covered in flour from dredging the chicken.
The one positive was I stopped caring about the outcome of the game. I went about cooking, but my heart wasn’t in it. I turned in one of my finest meals to date, but I hardly had an appetite.
I had cooked something really great, just like when I made the paprikash earlier in the series. Just like when I made cacciatore during the first game of the conference finals, but it didn’t matter.
And two weeks later almost, that final meal has another note of sadness and poignancy: Myles Turner is no longer a Pacer. The franchise’s all-time blocks leader left for a divisional rival. A team I currently despise almost as much as the Knicks. The Bucks. I didn’t used to hate them until the last two years. Familiarity breeds contempt.
The kerfuffle over a game ball, one they seemed to have had the whole time. I’ve seen conflicting reports on it. Pretty funny thing to get made over. Some Bucks fans left some pretty nasty comments on Pacers social media posts memorializing George McGinnis, who had recently passed away.
McGinnis is one of four players to have his number retired by the team. He won two ABA titles with them. Every fanbase has idiots, like the Thunder fans who harassed Pacers fans after Game 7, but it still leaves one with a negative impression of the fanbase.
It’s not clear if it’s a matter of the front office offering an insultingly low number or if they were close but his camp wanted more from the contract: more years, a player option and a trade kicker. But the longest tenured Pacer is no more. A decade with the team and gone in a flash. What’s made Milwaukee famous, has made a loser out of me.
If Haliburton doesn’t get hurt, maybe it’s different. It’s worth getting into the tax. But now the window is shut and it doesn’t make sense to go into the tax, especially with ticket revenue likely to fall off due to the injury. Though the tax is assessed at the end of the season, but maybe the front office wanted more flexibility and not feel forced to make an in-season trade.
Maybe they flip Pascal Siakam, TJ McConnell, and all the other players who made this team such a joy to keep up with and who made you believe that they could finally win it all.
For me, they were a bright point in what’s been a brutal year in a stretch of difficult years. I started the year seeing fires on the hill behind my rental and by the end of the month, losing that home.
My life was upended once again at the start of the year, just like it was six years ago on New Year’s Day. I lost my mother, my home, my job, and my life in less than a month.
This time, I lost a place I called home for nearly three years. Leaving behind friends and places I dearly love. I don’t like to dwell on it because it makes that much more painful. It got so bad, that after finishing the Phil Ochs biography and seeing parallels to his final years to mine, I wrote a suicide note the night before my birthday.
I updated it after Game 7, when I couldn’t sleep and was grappling with yet another disappointment, yet another failure.
During this period of darkness, I at least had the Pacers to latch onto. That all my suffering might be assuaged by something of which I have long dreamt.
Winning a title is so hard. The odds are rarely in your favor. I just wish it could happen for them once. One title and I’d be okay with any suffering and disappointment that came after.
Life is incredibly unfair. I know this, more than a lot of people. And I know bemoaning it won’t change a thing. But this one hurts in a way I’ll never fully get over. Because it’s another future that feels stolen.
A game seven loss would have hurt and the what ifs and counter-factual would have lingered. But this is something worse, something haunting. Akin to what some would call The One That Got Away. You think of what you might have done to get a different outcome.
“A fellow will remember a lot of things you wouldn't think he'd remember. You take me. One day, back in 1896, I was crossing over to Jersey on the ferry, and as we pulled out, there was another ferry pulling in, and on it there was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on. She was carrying a white parasol. I only saw her for one second. She didn't see me at all, but I'll bet a month hasn't gone by since that I haven't thought of that girl,” Everett Sloane as Mr. Bernstein, Citizen Kane.
Maybe this allows the Pacers to get where they need to be to really contend for a title. But it’s hard to imagine things being better when you’re at your lowest.
It’s been nearly a year and half since I had a job. I’m broker than I have ever been. I am nearing middle age and have nothing to show for it: no career, no family, nothing. Best I can hope for is a footnote in the someone else’s story. Like the Pacers. Again.
Miles Raymond : I'm finished. I'm not a writer, I'm a middle school English teacher. Well, the world doesn't give a shit what I have to say. I'm unnecessary. Ha! I'm so insignificant I can't even kill myself.
Jack : Miles, what the hell is that supposed to mean?
Miles Raymond : Come on, man. You know. Hemingway, Sexton, Plath, Woolf. You can't kill yourself before you're even published!
Jack : What about the guy who wrote Confederacy of Dunces? He committed suicide before he was published. Look how famous he is!
Miles Raymond : Thanks.
Jack : Just don't give up, alright? You're gonna make it.
Miles Raymond : Half my life is over and I have nothing to show for it. Nothing. I'm a thumbprint on the window of a skyscraper. I'm a smudge of excrement on a tissue surging out to sea with a million tons of raw sewage.
Jack : See? Right there. Just what you just said. That is beautiful. 'A smudge of excrement... surging out to sea.'
Miles Raymond : Yeah.
Jack : I could never write that.
Miles Raymond : Neither could I, actually. I think it's Bukowski.
I have no prospects and the longer I go without work, the dimmer things get, the harder it is to get back in the market. The more my self-worth shrinks. Maybe things will get better, but it’s hard to see that happening when all your efforts never pay off. The cliché about insanity is that it’s doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. For me that’s thinking the Pacers ever had a shot.
Other people have it worse. I’m lucky in many respects. I have a roof over my head, I’m trying to find meaning in my life in other ways, through cooking for others, using my time and talents in ways to help others. There are much worse things than your basketball team losing it all in Game 7 of the Finals. But for me, they were a refuge from the really sad, really difficult parts of life.
But now that the season is over and in such a painful way, there’s nowhere to direct these emotions. When you’re waiting on your life to really start, the way it seems to have for others, you wonder if it will ever happen or if you must be content with a life that always falls short.
“Good times are comin', I hear it everywhere I go
Good times are comin', I hear it everywhere I go
Good times are comin', but they sure are comin' slow” - Neil Young, “Vampire Blues”
Certain aspects of those Bills teams that fell short four years in a row sound a little like the Pacers.
“Even on their very worst days, when their star quarterback was injured and they fell behind 35–3, the Buffalo Bills found a way to come back and win. They had stars all over the field—quarterback, running back, wide receiver, defense—and they tormented opponents with an innovative quick-strike, no-huddle offense that produced highlight after highlight after highlight: boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
The Bills not only won, they changed the time signature of football; they made the notoriously slow game flow. Defenses could hardly get set before the Bills were scoring all over them. It was one of the great charmed runs in the history of American sports, and the best part was that it was all happening in snow-buried, Rust Belt, shitty old Buffalo—a paragon of uncool, edge-of-the-map, glamourless American suffering, where the old industrial jobs had long ago dried up and which tourists had absolutely zero reason ever to visit. Buffalo’s winter wind was so strong that it tipped the stadium’s goalposts to one side; fans came to games dressed for polar expeditions.”
Every round of the playoffs, the Pacers had insane comebacks and their style tended to wear down teams that lacked their depth and poise. They played teams physical, all 94-feet, and they whipped the ball around so much that if the physical toll of playing at their pace and effort didn’t exhaust you, your brain would be fried by the fourth quarter from trying to keep up.
Maybe teams attempt to replicate the approach of the Pacers by building deep rosters with star players supported by role players and playing deep into the bench even in the playoffs so that the players who can take over the game have the legs to do so when the moment comes. Time will tell.
Pacers didn’t have the excruciating experience of losing four Super Bowls in a row, but their history is certainly filled with brutal moments.
“Given all of this, it is easy to imagine how a 24-year-old Buffalonian, a young man who felt like his life was falling apart, whose ties to the social contract had been severed, who had recently suffered a nervous breakdown and seriously considered suicide, who was almost certainly suffering from undiagnosed PTSD, who—although he was a decorated veteran of the recent Gulf War—was now working as a poorly paid security guard on the graveyard shift at the Buffalo Zoo, with side gigs as a rent-a-cop at local pro wrestling matches and monster truck rallies, who was therefore so short on money that he didn’t even have phone service, who spent his free time nursing conspiracy theories about the U.S. government and writing ominous letters to the editor of his local paper—it is easy to imagine how this young man might have been lured into making a bad decision: into betting all of the very little money he had, and then some, on a victory for the Buffalo Bills in Super Bowl XXVII.”
Sounds a little like me: PTSD, suicidal, alienated, life gone to pot, broke. I’m not a gambling man and I could never bet on the Pacers beyond maybe taking the over on the win totals because they usually defy expectations. It would cheapen the experience for me to bet on them.
“I am not saying that Timothy McVeigh bombed Oklahoma City in 1995 because the Buffalo Bills lost four Super Bowls in a row. (They made it back in 1994 and—incredibly—lost that one too, cementing their reputation as the greatest losers in NFL history.) Such a claim would be absurd. Human motives are incalculably complex. But that Buffalo heartbreak was one of the many shadows that fell across McVeigh’s life between his unstable childhood and his perpetration of mass murder in Oklahoma City.
The almost unbelievable failure of the Bills, and the civic pain it caused, amplified his native pain. After McVeigh returned from the Gulf War, his Bills fandom was one of the few positive social networks he was able to plug back into, one of the most powerful, stable, visceral communities to which he unquestionably belonged. Its failure was devastating, to him and to everyone else in the area. To this day, even well-adjusted Buffalonians walk around imagining alternate lives in which their team actually won four Super Bowls in a row, becoming arguably the greatest team in NFL history, putting the city on the map in a way it otherwise never could have dreamed of.
Or at least won one Super Bowl, securing a happy little foothold in history. Instead, that 1990s Bills team is remembered as a tragic joke. It’s easy to pretend that sports doesn’t matter in real life, but for many millions of people, it does. It matters profoundly, every day.
After Super Bowl XXVII, Timothy McVeigh went looking for somewhere else to be, something else to do—something bigger, more meaningful, more real. Reality had failed him, in so many ways, so he went off to pursue his own fantasy of justice, very far from Buffalo.”
It might seem odd to hone in on a figure like McVeigh, but he is extremely relevant to the current moment. Both for his connection to the two teams in the Finals. He committed his crimes in 1995 in OKC and was put to death in 2001 in Terre Haute, Indiana. And his beloved Bills were nearly moved to Seattle during a period of financial difficulty.
And that team was very nearly purchased by the current president and author of a lot of miseries. Maybe things are different if he’s busy trying to run an NFL team.
Maybe his policies fuel the despair of other young men who feel alienated by a society that they have no stake in and one that has no use for them. Prime fuel for what I’ve dubbed The Years of Lead Paint. A shittier, dumber sequel to Italy’s Years of Lead.
What stochastic terror will be see from the right wing militia types and similar and how many of them will be previously known to the FBI?
Can’t justify his actions or the extremist stances that led him there, but on some level his despair with his life, amplified by the crushing defeat of his sports team, makes sense.
You can understand why someone would lose their mind after being disillusioned by their participation in the system. In order for the current system to work, it requires there to be losers.
And often times the losers, the ones who get fed through the woodchipper, fail through no fault of their own, through circumstances of birth, education, and just plain bad luck.
Some of those factors can insulate you but you’re a few bad breaks away from being unhoused, unwanted, and alienated from the world. A forgotten man. Life is unfair and there but for fortune go you and I. At least in another lifetime before my life died the death of a thousand cuts and I hit rock bottom, joined now by my team.
#YesCers. Go Pacers.