Some of the excesses in basketball have trickled down to a ridiculously young
age, in this case, all
the way down to eighth grade in Chicago, where the kids are, naturally,
mimicking everything they see on TV, and no doubt planning on how to spend their
illusory NBA millions.
If you ever get a chance to work with young kids playing basketball, you'll
realize pretty quickly how firm a hold the NBA has on their imagination: out of
a group of 50, 40 to 45 will tell you they are going to make it to the NBA. It's
really an astonishing thing to explore and someone should be doing academic
papers on it.
Anyway, it's kind of pathetic to think about things at that age being so
ridiculous, but that's where things are, so we may as well get used to it.