Adios, cowboy
Westerns, and what we can learn from the Suns rejecting old tropes of entertainment.
It’s hard to pick a cowboy of best fit for Chris Paul. It isn’t the grizzled cattle driver turned loner sheriff, isn’t the cocky gunslinger who has been burned (but, closer), and it’s not the outlaw train heister with a strict moral code. These cowboys we know so well because they are holdover tropes of chivalry and the rare, closer to fantasy concept of an independence beheld to no one. But Paul, in his circumspect passage around the west and its conference these past seasons, feels due for a cowboy.
What strikes in his career is that he’s always been the loner, even when taking on roles — like with the NBPA — that are rooted in the larger social whole. Early on it was what he asked for that cut him, however prematurely, as a solitary figure. Pressing for a say in the Hornets’ front office decisions when his NBA experience was green as spring sage crushed underfoot. Later it would be in embracing the defacto Mayoral role for Lob City, both organizer and public face — two things that tend to meet where they become mutually abhorred. Paul’s was the familiar, typically shown screaming face of a franchise that just couldn’t do it — win or stake a longterm identity. But retrospectively, that Clippers team was the closest in league history to that heady mix of visible and likeable, of something getting underway. That’s how it goes with glory days, we never see them, see ourselves in them, until we’re too far away to appreciate how complete a picture we were.
Out in Houston, James Harden was the bandit king, the ultimate heist man, the perfect bad guy if Paul had been permitted to declare that town wasn’t big enough for the both of them. But even if it wasn’t — it wasn’t — he couldn’t, they were teammates. Maybe Harden saw himself as a Don Quixote who went to Mykonos raves in his offseason, but Paul was no Sancho Panza.
If the desert could talk, it wouldn’t tell you anything.
I was thinking about Western tropes, or maybe the entire concept of the American West as trope as they relate to chivalry, because of the Phoenix Suns and the NBA, because of Jane Campion’s response to Sam Elliot’s claiming the entire mythology of the American West for a subsection of white guys playing pretend1, and because of entertainment, the conduit for which all these things take on cultural significance, worthwhile or not.
The cowboy of the American West was the updated version of medieval literature’s chivalric code, which was its own invented trope. The concept of knights, courtly love, bravery, service to others, all of it taken as historically accurate until it came under scrutiny by the budding practice of modern scholarship in the 19th century. The term chivalry, from Old French chevalerie, basically translates to cowboy — it meant horse soldiery. More than symbolic, or linguistic, the inventions both share a more urgent, simple and practical origin: entertainment.
The centuries that chivalry as concept, then trope, sprung from were brutal. So was any real-life practice of its code, mainly enforced by the chokehold of the Catholic church. The mythology of King Arthur and later, Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, were honed from a safe distance through time. Centuries as a buffer. Westerns are the same.
A chivalric American West, as concept, as art, as entertainment, came out of the same kind of terror and blood, the people living through it with lives so grim and unyielding that a concept like the cowboy, a figure able to take nothing but dirt and sky and chrysalize into something noble and free, was probably a lifeline, even if they knew better than anyone that it never existed. Sancho Panza was Don Quixote’s squire, and in writing a story meant to undermine the vanity and hollowness of chivalry, Miguel de Cervantes gave us an early Western.
The West as concept is camp, it is also chivalry camping out. Where Paul and the Suns tie in is how they make lousy examples of the tropes we, and undoubtably the NBA, want them to be, these resolute winners of the West.
The desert is ghosts. Rattler whispers. Dried up lakes. Bones scattered in Morse. The desert is in past tense, which is why it becomes a place to superimpose your future over. Time is a lank, cascading thing suspended off in the distance like a heat mirage.
All season long the Suns have been working. It’s been very a good, sure and fine work, but to the Suns, under Paul and Monty Williams, it is only work. What’s worse, there is nothing burdensome, boasting, or eternally exhausted detectable in it. What the Suns are doing doesn’t align with our own cultural tropes of what work is meant to look like.
There is no struggle in the sunny dominance of Deandre Ayton, his meetings around the rim are not the high-noon kind, rife with revenge. He’s more meeting you at the hitching post and offering your tired horse a sugar cube from his flat open palm. JaVale McGee, exemplified best in his recent “not mad, just disappointed” comments on an Orlando fan attempting to draw him into something, the impossibly (because the sheriff is always half or full evil, drunk, a grifter, or all three) unproblematic sheriff. Devin Booker, maligned most all of his career for being stuck in the discourse churn whirlpool of not good enough while simultaneously overrated, has mellowed alongside Paul, and on his most successful Suns team yet, into a player so consistent, so steady, so quiet, that he’s achieved the rarest thing a star in the NBA can — invisibility.
Even Paul, the kind of player, like the kind of cowboy, who seemed to always have his eyes set on the horizon, some far-off future distance that would escape him from a present short on promise, has settled into satisfaction with the rhythm of right now. Phoenix only ever plays in the moment. Of their rare losses (14), there is no lingering. No chippy words that will be panned for a soundbite or blog gold over and over again. And of their wins (53) there are only the kinds of celebrations that come when a job well done is a long day’s work — washing their hands, changing their clothes, getting some shut-eye so they can do it again.
They make for boring cowboys.
What the desert offers is a backdrop and a foreground, a complete environment devoid of its most distracting markers. This is the intoxication of the desert, it is whatever you need it to be. You are made and remade in it, often in the same day. Its most familiar signifiers — heat and sand — work to scour your cells as much as the blank slate of its setting. You can feel it working you over as your mind moves to consider all the versions of yourself you are, could become, in the vibrating pliancy of the desert’s space, pressing in.
Quiet resolve, Paul’s keen but not desperate understanding that his shots at a title are running out, a kind of acceptance of that bearing out in play, in existing in the moment. More than an unwillingness to be baited, lured or caught out in storylines meant to mire them than a complete and total obliviousness to these cues, as if existing team-wide on a different frequency. An easy, close camaraderie, made in quiet moments unobservable to the public, to the fiefdom of fandom. A coach whose most charged expression comes in a furrowed brow, the rare stern look cross-court.
The Suns are wholly internal, they are also bad good guys.
Not the heroes who are made more memorable to us because they are unlikable, flawed, immoral, but the dull hero. The resolutely good with nothing to show for it, the doing fine and not especially flashy. We like our leads with optics. With extra bravado we can wield against them if necessary. With smugness, with excess, with immense and unshakeable pride. We like this because we are, so often, projecting.
The NBA has thrived best where its inner-workings are laid bare, secrets made aggregate, its heroes loud as its villains. Phoenix, with a win record barely shy of historic, is not seen to be as consistently compelling to us as the whims of pining executives or monoliths, crumbling.
Our attention spans have no doubt been sheared shorter, but our obsession with reframing recent history for entertainment over drawing a more immediate and straightforward satisfaction from the present is cousins in compulsion with the same storytelling of the West, or a medieval heroism based on, essentially, manners. Why else have we had two big budgeted shows focusing on Goliath franchises and the turmoil it took to temper or tear them apart? Michael Jordan’s Bulls and Jerry Buss’s Lakers are ancient history as far as the light years of the league go, and so the timing is perfect for the cloying, obnoxious, and heaving dark of them to be made new.
This isn’t a screed against mining our history for entertainment. I think it is clear that’s been the way humans process the past and project our regrets and mourning, what we wished it had been, onto the future. But the mistakes come in exchanging it for the present so eagerly that we’re willing to restrict ourselves, our dialogue, even our tired tropes, to outdated overtures that no longer serve us.
The last two out of three NBA Championships have been won by outliers to those old tropes, and the Suns are pushing — plainly, firmly, joyfully even if no one seems to be watching — to add another one. Entertainment, what we deem to be entertaining, changes all the time. Like Campion called the experience of the American West, it too is a mythic space. What the Suns are doing, even if they don’t manage to do it, is creating a new form, outside the familiar, repetitive noise, forged from radiant quiet. They might make for bad cowboys, bad tropes, because they’re trying for the real thing.
As a post-pub footnote, I wish Jane Campion hadn’t gone full Black woman erasure by singling out Serena and Venus Williams, two of the greatest athletes alive, and making the claim they’d never faced the misogyny she has hours after I wrote this. The more you reject tropes, the more you can walk right into them. In Campion’s case, as a white feminist participating in blatant misogynoir.
What a well written, fun, and thought-provoking article. Thanks.