Yesterday, Client 9 informed me via facebook that FreeDarko was dead. Bethlehem Shoals found there to be some grander mission that mythologizing the NBA, and will just share his thoughts on FanHouse from now on. Their simple mission had been accomplished: Darko is now a regular part of the rotation for the Timberwolves and the Pistons are now the laughingstock of the League with the first walkout I've ever heard of in the NBA's history.
It's great to read those great writers share their thoughts about the site's impact, which they hit all the points that I agree with. First, that FreeDarko legitimized blogs. Deadspin showing dicks and KSK's imaginary monologues and dialogues fill niches that I love to read, but FreeDarko consistently is thought-provoking.
I found FreeDarko after this happened:
.I had never seen anything so beautiful in my life, and as a college freshman with no idea where my life would take me (spoiler: unemployment living at my parent's house), I read up on the Warriors and Baron and Captain Jack and Adonal "Am" Foyle (Jewish joke, sorry) during their first-round crapping on the Mavs, where pseudo-MVP Dirk soiled the bed. But then I read this, and I looked like Nasim Pedrad after touching Helen Mirren's tits:
I realized basketball could be a scholarly pursuit, and not in the Daryl Morey sense of crunching numbers, but that it could be contextualized into other disciplines. I ended up choosing International Relations as my major and I spent a lot of time (maybe too much time if one were to look at my transcript) trying to draw parallels between autocrats and the NBA superstars ("Kobe is sooo Than Shwe of Myanmar's military junta!"). I tried to use film, my other favorite pursuit, in some terrible posts like this and this, that just come of as drug-addled. I could never produce the analysis that they could in creating lists of comparable trios to the Big 3 in Miami.
The Almanac was also a revelation. I realized there was a manifesto that showed that you didn't need to love one team to love the NBA. I was part of the paradigm of Liberated Fandom, growing up in a non-NBA city but enjoying being able to watch the NBA on NBC and TBS and TNT and ESPN and ABC. I even ended up using a quote from the Ron Artest section of the Almanac as the quote that explained my thesis on the failure of Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations beginning in 1993 ("I'm trying to be positive, I'm a big fan of the Nobel Peace Prize."). My thesis advisor and the other students in my seminar laughed, but it was the perfect moment in my academic development. I had taken something that I loved and studied thoroughly, basketball, and synthesized it with what I chose as my academic field.
FreeDarko taught me that I could love watching basketball in a way I never thought possible. I could view it through an academic lens instead of beer goggles, enjoying it as an art form as well as a power struggle that exposed the emotions of so many, most of whom give no consideration to these conflicts. But as someone who enjoys some things not enjoyed by the common fan, like team loyalty and other things that sportswriters love to wax poetic about as essential characteristics to professional athletes, FreeDarko showed me there were others who enjoyed the sport like I do. I thank you, Shoals, and your compatriots, for enlightening me. I am disappointed to see the site end, much as I was with the demise of FireJoeMorgan. But its spirit lives on in the liberated fandom of myself and countless others as well as a new appreciation for the game shared by a community that read your work, sometimes perplexed, sometimes in complete agreement, but always ending up enlightened.
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