LeBron vs Jordan: A Demonstration of Ignorance
Why the basketball GOAT debate matters if you care about history.
Greetings readers,
I’m sure some of you might scratch your heads over the title of this blogpost. After all, professional basketball doesn’t seem to be a topic that a blog named Indonesian and American would cover. As the owner of this publication, I don’t need to justify this course of action. But I’ll do so nonetheless. :)
First of all, this blog is called Indonesian and American. Thus, I feel like I should cover American things once in a while.
Secondly, basketball is a relatively popular sport in Indonesia. And the NBA has its fair share of followers there. Though I only started following the sport around the mid-2000s, I am very much familiar with the figure of Michael Jordan. And when my younger cousins from Indonesia visited me a few years ago, they ended up visiting Cleveland. Why? Because LeBron James was playing for the Cavaliers at the time.
Who’s the GOAT?
Thus, we get to the GOAT1 debate between these two players. Who’s better? Michael or LeBron?
Well, I’ll be honest. I found it very disheartening that this was a debate in the first place since anyone who had a real good look of the facts cannot seriously argue that LeBron James is anywhere near the level of Michael Jordan, let alone beat him.
But the point of this post is not to talk about basketball statistics. This video does a good job of analyzing this issue in-depth:
If the “inside baseball”2 of professional basketball doesn’t interest you, you don’t have to watch the video. The point is that this debate should not exist. And yet, it’s something that people in basketball circles bring up from time to time.
Why Does This Matter?
One possible response to all this is to just ignore the whole thing. I mean, who cares right? It’s just ten guys running around a court to throw a ball into a basket. This debate is just a tiny bit more respectable than arguing who would win in a battle between Superman and Goku.
This is a reasonable position, and one that I’m tempted to adopt altogether. But I honestly can’t. Why? Because this debate shows a phenomenon that I’ve noticed when it comes to people’s attitude to the past: the recency bias.
According to Wikipedia3, recency bias is a type of cognitive bias that “favors recent events over historic ones.” In other words, people are more likely to place more importance to things that happened recently compared to things that happened a long time ago.
In the basketball debate, this is shown in people who downplay the achievements of past players. Some may say that players like Jordan dominated a weak era. Others like to bring up the idea that players back then are not as athletic as current day players, the implication being that even a mediocre player in today’s NBA would dominate if he had played in the previous decades. Regardless, the disrespect for the past is evident in the mentality.
Now I’d like to move on to other kinds of history. In contrast to their sports counterpart, this recency bias is dangerous because these debates now take on a moral dimension. It’s no longer which sports player is better but rather which time period is better. Perhaps this is an American thing, but sometimes I have my experience with people who don’t hold the past in high regard. Such a thing is rife on the Internet. Here’s one example of this:
Can you sense the absolute contempt from this Twitter user? I sure can. The fact that he was just plain wrong is pretty much secondary.
But while it’s tempting to simply dismiss this as nothing but an Internet phenomenon, they also exist in real life settings. Personally, I see this back in college when I was a part of the “history club”. While I enjoyed my time there, there seemed to be a prevalence amongst my then peers of the belief that history is nothing but evil people doing evil things. Lest one might think that it’s just the “ignorant students” who do this, I’ve also had a professor in one of my classes refer to classical American/European writers as “dead white males”.4
Conclusion
This brings me to the conclusion of my blogpost. To be honest, I have been watching a lot of basketball analysis videos on YouTube - this post is basically my way of letting people know about it. But more importantly, the attitude of disrespect that a lot of people have towards the past is something that I’ve noticed in general. Thus, when I see people downplaying the achievements of Michael Jordan (or other legends like Bill Russell or Kobe Bryant), I can’t help but see the pattern at play which goes beyond sports.
Perhaps this is an American thing. Personally, I have yet to see Indonesians engage in what I call “cultural self-laceration” or the mocking of history (especially their own). I don’t doubt that people with such an attitude exist, but they have to be pretty rare compared to their American counterparts.
Personally, I hope to never hear any Indonesian refer to their national heroes as “dead brown males”.
Until next time,
Michael P. Marpaung
Short for ‘Greatest Of All Time’
Heh.
Yes, I’m using Wikipedia as a source. I’m not in school anymore.
For some reason, this term is in the Cambridge Dictionary. So it’s not just some niche/isolated thing.
The Jordan era NBA was followed all over the world, was exciting and dramatic and had a host of great characters and players.
Not so the more modern era.
Thanks for introducing me to a very useful term - "recency bias". I'd never heard it before and yet we are saturated with it.