Kobe and Magic: Let’s Remember Michael Jackson, And Us, For Things Other Than Deviant Sex

Michael Jackson’s Memorial at the Staples Center was filled with all kinds of musical and entertainment luminaries, and for their part, Laker greats Magic Johnson and Kobe Bryant showed up to eulogize an old buddy (really? Kobe was a buddy? Weird, man).  But there was something else going on that’s pretty impossible to ignore.

One could, if one so wanted, get as cynical as possible and just fixate on the fact that an HIV-positive man who contracted the disease by cheating on his wife paired up with an accused rapist and confessed adulterer to honor an acquitted but generally-accepted-to-be-guilty-of-something child molester. And, obviously, the charges against Jackson shadowed even the most histrionic reporting all week. Magic’s speech seemed to hint at this, when he pointedly declared “This is a celebration of his life, of his legacy.”

Ultimately, the big question here is this: Does the public ignore superstar behavior because they’re separating The Man from The Myth, or because we just make excuses so we can still enjoy the show?

It would be nice to just say we’re all being sophisticated, that we can all watch the movie/opera/play/concert without wondering about all of the artists’ sex lives or whatever because we’re too wrapped up in the craft.  And that an adherence to the simple beauty of The Game keeps us from watching football and after every touchdown saying “Yeah, but how does he treat his wife?”  But that’s obviously a load of crap: pit an all-wife-beater NFL team against an all-homosexual NFL team and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out whose off the field exploits suddenly become relevent, regardless of how great they play.

On the other side of it, maybe we’ve been making excuses for ourselves all along.  Would any reasonable person argue that a sports and entertainment world devoid of dopers, wife-abusers, adulterers, sexual weirdos, sociopaths and criminals would be anything but empty and boring?  Or that there are some people, like Magic, MJ and Kobe, who are too good to have any of this ever stick to them in any real, debilitating way? Have we all just kind of made this silent agreement to every once in a while make a snide remark about Kobe and “room service” but still keep watching the NBA Finals and just be OK with that? It would certainly seem to be our only choice, now that every blog and 24/7 news outlet can dig up every little thing that nobody knew or cared about even sixty years ago.

Either way, there’s no getting around the fact that, suspending that outrage for a moment and just watching two great basketball players talk about a great singer and philanthropist, was just a nice, little moment. It’s this too much knowledge, this damnable adult knowledge, that keeps getting in the way.