On Wednesday, the Minnesota Timberwolves beat the Los Angeles Lakers, 124-104, adding yet another emphatic victory over LA to their resumé. This season, the Wolves have a 3-1 record against LeBron James and the Lakers and boast an impressive 14.2 point margin of victory on the year. Wednesday night wasn’t just a blowout victory, it was an all-around beatdown, with plenty of trash-talking every step of the way. The climax of the clownery came at the end of the game when Russell Westbrook air-balled a corner three.
Karl-Anthony Towns looks around as if checking for a breeze in the arena while Patrick Beverley runs to the ref, throws the ball in the air, and evades it as if he had to dodge Westbrook’s bad miss. It was peak comedy.
For Wolves fans, much of this season has been a long fever dream of good vibrations and unbridled enthusiasm. Stepping into the Target Center is like entering a different universe. Outside the gates lies the buttoned-up, polite, and utterly midwestern streets of Minneapolis. Inside the walls of the arena, however, it’s a loud and boisterous celebration of this year’s Timberwolves team. They have become not only a fan-favorite, but they also are making a legitimate case for being the best non-Kevin Garnett Wolves team ever.
Although Timberwolves fans and players are in the midst of a long-overdue triumphant season, not everyone sees it that way. In a strange turn of events, the Wolves became the center of national media’s attention not for their performance on the floor, but rather for their antics. On ESPN’s First Take, Stephen A. Smith took Towns and Beverley to task for mocking Westbrook at the end of last week’s game.
During his diatribe, Stephen A. makes a confusing argument that he respects Beverley for his behavior because that’s who he’s always been. However, Towns, it seems, doesn’t have the right to demonstrate the same way that Beverley did because he’s only been to the playoffs once.
I find this an odd position to take. Sure, Towns hasn’t had the team success that Westbrook has had, but that’s hardly a fair comparison. Westbrook has played with Kevin Durant, Paul George, James Harden, and now LeBron James. That’s four Hall of Fame players. Towns spent one and some change contentious seasons playing with Jimmy Butler. Butler is undoubtedly headed to the Hall of Fame, but he’s no LeBron, KD, or Harden.
The problem here is that Stephen A. has one of the biggest platforms in sports media. The things he says matter and the narratives that he paints affect the way that people view the league, no matter how preposterous his position is. It’s rare for the Timberwolves to get national media attention and even rarer for them to play a nationally televised game. There are a lot of people who hear what Stephen A. has to say about Towns without having watched Towns play, speak or simply move through the world. But those same people hear Stephen A. say he’s classless or hasn’t done anything in the league, and it influences the way they think about Towns.
Stephen A. continued by saying, “[Westbrook] is clearly having an absolutely, positively miserable season; the worst season of his career. But to mock him like that, I was like, ‘Damn, that’s kind of classless, y’all. Y’all can do better than that, especially when you’re Minnesota and you ain’t been doing anything for the better part of the last two decades.’… It was a little excessive. A little bit unclassy, I might say.”
I have to take a moment here to break down my problem with describing athletes as classy or classless. This isn’t so much about Stephen A. villainizing Towns, but rather a larger issue with the way that the media talks about professional athletes.
The term class is steeped with racist undertones that, however subtle, hold real-life implications in regards to how we think about these athletes. Class is about sophistication and elegance. When Africans were stolen from their land and enslaved, they were viewed as barbaric, as sub-human, as the distinct opposite of “having class.” They were, in reality, classless. The sophisticated white man came to the continent of Africa, colonized the land, forcefully taught their religion, and committed innumerable atrocities upon black people. When we expect players to behave with class, we are holding them to a standard that is set by whiteness.
Class is a tool of white supremacy to further stratify white people and people of color. The idea is that if the wealthy, white man is the ideal picture of class in America or Britain or France, etc. then proximity to and imitation of those traits becomes the standard. By that logic, an enslaved black person is about as far away from the ideal classy gentleman as you can get. So, when Stephen A. says that Towns is “Kind of classless,” he is upholding a white supremacist ideology that stems directly from the dehumanization of black people. Unfortunately, our culture is so deeply entrenched in white supremacy that these things have become normalized.
And now back to your regularly scheduled programming.
For Wolves fans, we know how much this season means to KAT. It’s been seven long years in a Timberwolves uniform. Finally, after so much tragedy and hardship, Towns is leading a team to the playoffs. There is no turmoil this year. There is no coaching turnover, or teammates demanding to be traded. And there are no questions about whether Towns is a winner. The Timberwolves are flat-out good, and they deserve to celebrate.
So, let the Wolves keep on clowning. Let them keep on soaking up the energy from the crowd. It’s been too long since Minnesota had a Timberwolves team that they could get behind. Finally, the Wolves have arrived. I hope that national media coverage can show up to a playoff game and see just how special this year is inside the Target Center. It’s hard not to join in the abundant celebration when you’re in the stands. For Wolves fans, this is a feel-good year. For Karl-Anthony Towns, this is vindication that is a long time coming. I hope to see the clowning continue. If the Wolves are gonna be painted as rude, or classless by the media, so be it. At the end of the day, all that matters is wins and losses, and right now, the Wolves are winning.
