The Beautiful Madness Of Crazy Pills Artest
Now, everyone knows about the other clip where he mentions the incredibly sad, bizarre, and true story about the kid getting killed with a chair leg. I wasn’t surprised when I heard that clip from Ron. I was surprised when people were surprised it’s true. Ron Artest is a lot of things. A liar he ain’t. Crazy doesn’t make him a liar. Not this type of crazy. Additionally, considering the world Artest came out of wasn’t exactly peachy.
But what fascinates me, and what is not as sad, but is delightfully Crazy Pills, is Artest’s series of actions.
He gets elbowed in the throat by the second best basketball player on the planet.
He runs over to discuss it with the referee, and begins a conversation.
Partway through the conversation it occurs to Ron that he’s not getting through to him. So he goes to the next thing on his little mental list.
“Get in Kobe Bryant’s face in the midst of a 40 point game and bark at him until you are ejected.” Check.
This is going to seem a little non-sequiter. Bear with me.
Whenever I end up discussing classic fictional villains with friends, I make the case that Hannibal Lector is simultaneously a magnificent villain, a terrible villain, and outside the bounds of villainy itself. He’s fantastic because his moral marrowlessness is so profound, it’s grotuesque. He’s the boogeyman, if the boogeyman didn’t actually care that he was in your closet and just killed and ate you because it was convenient and you were loud. He’s terrible because his keen intellect and masterful manipulations are so, well, cool that you end up rooting for the guy. No, thing. You end up rooting for the thing. And that leads into why he’s not a villain in the first place. A creature so far removed from the human moral and ethical concepts that by instinct or environment are ingrained in us cannot accurately be referred to as human. He’s not a human being. He’s a being.
Now, Ron Artest is a man. He’s probably been a good person to some people and a bad person to others, like the rest of us. He is in no way similar in his actual person to the fictional construct of Hannibal Lector. But his caricature on the floor? That’s remarkably similar. You saw it in Daryl Morey and Shane Battier’s discussion of Artest as a bulldog. It’s why there’s nothing personal between Kobe and Artest on Kobe’s side. Kobe’s bothered when someone personally attemtps to bring him down. Like Raja Bell. Ronnie Brewer (I still don’t know what that poor kid did to deserve that). LeBron James,though it’s friendly. Artest to him is like dodging burning wreckage on the highway.
Now we enter Game 3. Fisher’s suspended. The Rockets got beat down in Game 2. The Lakers are awake now, and the challenge becomes harder. And Artest is either, as he says, completley in control of himself and prepared to just go out and play the surprisingly controlled, efficient ball he’s been playing in the playoffs…
or he’s got a toothpick hidden away to pick the lock, and we’re talking the basketball equivalent of Lamar Odom and fava beans on Saturday.
Oh, Crazy Pills. How we love you.
