Sports writer Bomani Jones captured Heat fans leaving Tuesday’s game early.

During the game’s commercial breaks, I browsed cable news coverage of the George Zimmerman trial, America’s most recent instance of centuries of systemic racism distilled into one man doing a very dumb thing with a gun, then cowering beneath the defense of the even dumber Florida law made possible by the dumbest amendment in our Constitution. One pundit decried Zimmerman’s defense attorneys for articulating something akin to an Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer logic in their pursuit of jurors unbiased by media coverage of the shooting last year. “What is going on in Florida tonight?”, the pundit asked incredulously. I then caught snippets of The Daily Show’s coverage of recent immigration reform debates, in which John Oliver lambasted former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and current Florida Senator Cottonmouth for deciding it might be politically expedient to curry the favor of Latino voters in order to re-color Florida red for 2014 and beyond.

I lived in Florida this past year as a visiting assistant professor at Rollins College, a liberal arts school tucked away in a tony suburb of Orlando far removed from central Florida’s exurban theme park sprawl, yet intimately bound up with it economically and culturally. As such, I’ve developed a deeply ambivalent relationship with the state’s perceived wackiness so taken for granted in American media. On the one hand, I’ve been eager to disabuse visitors of the notion that Florida is all beaches and bath salt-huffing loonies, that it has all the same amenities and experiences necessary to sustain the habitus of “enlightened” academic-types. On the other hand, I’ve often been just as eager to join the chorus of pshaws whenever something from the Florida Man Twitter feed makes its way into national news.

More than anything, though, I’ve come to embrace this ambivalence and admire Florida’s totemic hold over the American psyche. Most of us have some version of a love-hate relationship with the place we’re from or where we live, but few outside our respective hometowns have strongly held opinions about these places in the same way non-Floridians do about Florida. It has been strange to absorb outsiders’ misguided conceptions of Florida from within it this year, one that began for me with the state again playing a contested role in the Presidential election and ending with the run up to what will likely be the highest profile American court case since that of O.J. Simpson. But it has been even more heartening to see the extent to which Floridians take outsiders’ diagnoses of their home state in stride.

Florida is such a loaded signifier that any mediated discourse about goings-on within its borders is quickly sloughed off as misrepresentative of a more serious, flattering, or authentic American experience. Zimmerman’s trial thus becomes an opportunity not to examine the country’s continued racial tensions and gun culture, but to excoriate a disturbed vigilante in some lawless backwater. Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush courting Florida Latinos affords us not the occasion to consider the increasingly heterogeneous cultural identities of American immigrants, but the chance to speculate wildly about the 2016 Presidential election and wonder who’ll win the state. And those leaving Tuesday’s game early are not exhausted basketball fans just hoping to sleep six hours before work in the morning, but fairweather scenesters eager to party on South Beach. As I leave Florida next week, I’ll do so with a renewed skepticism of these and so many other snap judgements about the state, knowing that there might not be a more accurate microcosm of what American culture is right now–for better, for worse, and everything in between–and what it is becoming.

The National Basketball Association’s lockout began July 1 and reached a provisional end on the day after Thanksgiving, but even if you’re the most casual of sports fans, chances are, you knew this.  And even if you’re the most casual of casual sports fans, chances are, ESPN played no small role in informing you about the work stoppage, introducing you along the way to vaguely noxious MBA-speak like “basketball related income” and “amnesty clause.”  All the while, non-ESPN media squawked about the lockout simply being a squabble between the rich and the super-rich; about how basketball isn’t football; even about how boring ESPN’s coverage of it all was.  I won’t deign to tell you WHAT IT WAS REALLY ALL ABOUT, though I tend to agree with Charles Pierce that by focusing so intently on money, we tend to miss the bigger picture.  Accordingly, I’d like to consider briefly not the content of the various back-and-forths among players, owners, and sports pundits, but the broader implications of ESPN’s mediation of this dialogue for televised sports.

If there is a takeaway point from Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller’s eminently skimmable (and purposely, polemically gender-biased) oral history of ESPN, it’s that the network fancies itself to be lifestyle television.  This manifests both in all the most banal ways you think it does (incessant talk of “the brand” and other Disney-fied corporate logics) and in more insidious ones that seek to make “ESPN” and “sports” as interchangeable as possible in viewers’ heads.  ESPN has a mixed, sometimes hilariously bad history of extending its own brand beyond the viewing moment, so its most valuable commodities are often the personalities on display in its programming.  Pardon the hacky Bill Simmons-ism, but if ESPN is Bravo, then at the present moment, the NBA is its Real Housewives, Top Chef, and Andy Cohen all rolled into one.  (The comments section is yours to work out the Housewives equivalents of the Miami Heat’s big three.)

This is not to ignore the significance of ESPN’s relationships with the other two major American professional sports leagues, but crucial differences exist between them and the NBA.  The NFL–the indisputable televised sports juggernaut of the recent past and forseeable future–contracts with three out of the four major broadcast networks and a number of cable (including the prized Monday Night Football franchise on ESPN) and satellite outlets.  Television is the NFL’s cash cow, and viewers seem to enjoy watching it.  MLB’s television interests are similarly spread among several broadcast and cable outlets, with myriad regional sports networks picking up the slack.  But baseball–with its 81+ home games per team per season, summer weather, and Tony LaRussas giving fans multiple opportunities for trips to the concession stand–prizes gate and gameday revenues much more than football does.

While it has long thrived on elements from both models, the NBA has become a decidedly more television friendly league, with ESPN leading the way.  In fact, the league’s only broadcast presence is with the also-Disney-owned ABC.  (TNT provides the other significant chunk of NBA coverage, but the netlet is more interested in using basketball as a promotional vehicle for Rizzoli & Isles than it is in building a brand identity around it.)  The outlets fortuitously renewed their deals with the NBA after a poorly rated Finals series in 2007, and it seems fair to say that ESPN was getting an undervalued property.  A change to the hand-checking rule the year before catalyzed a surge in league-wide scoring, and the LeBron-led class of stars would be entering their prime (and free agency years) over the course of the following decade.  Part of the pact also afforded ESPN wide-ranging use of the NBA’s digital content, an element commissioner David Stern saw as key in spurring the league’s global growth (and one that stands in stark contrast to other sports’ digital policies).  For ESPN, the NBA was fast becoming the most fertile land upon which to plant its flag as “The Worldwide Leader In Sports.”

It goes without saying, then, that ESPN had much riding on the resolution of the NBA lockout, not so much that it might be accused of anything unethical, but certainly enough to be guilty of belaboring viewer interest in the minutiae of labor.  Its lockout coverage arguably started in earnest with last summer’s “The Decision” special on the free-agent status of LeBron James, a stunt aimed just as much at stimulating interest in non-NBA fans as it was at narcotizing the resentment of NBA die-hards about the upcoming work stoppage.  Or, it’s the other way around.  I don’t know.  Either way, ESPN’s NBA coverage since “The Decision” has been not about uncovering the real issues behind the lockout or picking sides between players vs. owners or Dirk vs. LeBron.  Instead, its goal has been to breathlessly, relentlessly fuel the idea that discovering that truth or picking a side matters.  If you care not for such things, if you like your displays of athletic competition virtuous and untouched by the tentacles of capitalism, well, there’s always the college game.

One of sports’ biggest superstars, LeBron James, made waves this summer with his decision to leave the Cleveland Cavaliers to join fellow All-Stars Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh with the Miami Heat, an announcement he made with a one-hour hype machine on ESPN. James faced a wide range of criticism after the announcement in July:  the Cavaliers owner likened James to Benedict Arnold; Charles Barkley called the announcement a “punk move” and said the move to Miami will change James’ legacy; Michael Jordan said it’s something he never would have done. During the NBA season opener last week, as “King James” made his on court debut in a Heat uniform, Nike aired this 90-second spot for LeBron (below). According to Nike’s agency, the spot allows James to “address his off-season controversy head-on.”

Releasing commercials prior to an athlete’s return to sports for image rehabilitation is a familiar tactic for Nike, evidenced by the Tiger Woods ad featuring the voice of his dead father that aired the day before Woods returned to professional golf. But in both cases, Nike comes months late to the game. Waiting to “address off-season controversy” until the day the season (or golf tournament) actually starts only reconstitutes the very discussion Nike is trying to move beyond. Sure, the problems with Woods’ and James’ image are not quite comparable, and sure, both spots resulted in viral video buzz for Nike, but when it comes to the task of recuperating the tarnished image of a sports superstar, I’m not sure either of these ads get the job done.

This brings up a host of questions that I’ve been mulling over recently: first, is there even a need for Nike to actively rehabilitate either star’s image with television ads? And why these athletes and not others? Many sports columnists, commentators, and advertising industry execs are of the opinion that the negative impact of both Woods’ and James’ controversies would blow over once they returned to their respective sport, relying on the assumption that their athletic skill would outweigh their off-the-court misgivings. After all, Kobe Bryant returned to endorsement deals less than a year after being accused of rape with only a statement by Nike touting his athletic skill and basketball ability, not major image management efforts. What about Ben Roethlesberger, Serena Williams, or Brett Favre? What does this say about the specific contexts of sport stardom and our expectations (or lack of) for professional athletes as opposed to other celebrities? How do gender and race play into these narratives and/or athletes’ ability to play the villain, anti-hero, or underdog?

Second, if Nike’s ads don’t really work to rehabilitate the tarnished image of sports superstars, then what do they do? Certainly the ads contribute to the discourse about each star’s persona, which like any star text, give us a way to talk about the world around us. As Richard Dyer notes, stars serve as an important discursive space for the construction, narration, and negotiation of cultural meaning and social hierarchies. The James ad, in particular, comments on the way stars and star personas are inherently open for interpretation and unmoored from concrete meaning. Featuring James looking directly to the camera and asking, “What should I do?” followed by a host of somewhat playfully rhetorical follow up questions (“Should I admit I ruined my legacy?” “Should I just sell shoes?”), the spot takes a self-reflexive stance on the very precariousness of sports stardom. Asking “Should I be who YOU want me to be?” acknowledges this complexity and opens up a space for the viewer to ponder just what meaning they assign to James as a person, as an athlete, and as a star. But ultimately, these spots seek to fix the star text as a branded commodity. The complexity in LeBron’s question of “What should I do?” is of course neatly answered with Nike’s “Just Do It,” signaling a desperate attempt to cling to the sports star as a complex but coherent symbol of American capitalism. Thus, rather than rehabilitating James’ controversial image, Nike’s latest spot works hard to rehabilitate the very investment in sports stardom itself.

Next question:  Had it worked? Had ESPN’s Bill Simmons, champion of all things Boston, succeeded in organizing a series of live fan-chants during the game?  It turned out that he had, at least in part.  Via his twitter account “CelticChants,” Simmons suggested three taunts that the Boston crowd might hurl at the visiting Cavs.  The first one, “New York Knicks! New York Knicks!”, aimed at Lebron James and his aforementioned free agency, had in fact taken hold.   As the superstar took his first free throws, much of the crowd shouted in unison, an act the announcer Mark Breen described as “creative.”  Simmons’ other two suggestions were met with middling results.  But, unquestionably, the first one was a hit.

My reaction to this result is unambiguous. I don’t like it for a gamut of reasons ranging from the aesthetic to the (mildly) philosophical.  For one, it strikes me as kind of lame.  There was a sense of corporate supervision in the suggestions, with the second chant of “Rondo’s Better,” being particularly uninspired.  Yes, I’m somewhat relieved that the previously mentioned idea of yelling “Precious, Precious” at the terribly overweight Shaquille O’Neal didn’t take hold in a Boston crowd whose racial sensitivity is sometimes questionable.  However, to me, if there’s an essence to crowd activity, it’s organicism, or at least home-grownness.  I’m not interested in anything that Robert Iger has potential say in.

Secondly, if the experiment is to see if such a thing can work – if new media can succeed in stirring this brand of collective action – then, well, it’s not a very well controlled inquiry.  Simmons, with access to all the mass audience Disney can muster, isn’t much of a test case.  It reminds me somewhat of Kim Jong-Il heading out to the golf course with an army of assistants to see if the game’s as tough as everyone says.  What do you know, beginner’s luck.  This isn’t the end of the world, but it strikes me as both a blurring of lines and really vain.  I’d feel better if Simmons had skipped the ESPN.com promotion of the idea or, even better, if a true “everyday fan” had given it a shot.

That said, Simmons and his unique power to turn commentary into real life action did bring me a great deal of joy this weekend.  I finally picked up David Halberstam’s The Breaks of the Game, a book that had been out of print for ages and still would be, were it not for Simmons’ repeated recommendations.  It’s a fantastic, truly important sports book that thousands would be missing out on if not for the Sports Guy.  So perhaps I’ll give him a pass on the chant thing. But my weekend certainly brings into sharp relief the power of an Internet star and some of its potential abuses.