This week we're running a small package of essays on the topic of nuisances. Why? That's an annoying question.
The art of being a nuisance is actually not an art at all, but simply the glorification of persistence in pursuit of schadenfreude. And since sports tends to reward nuisances in outsized proportion to their essential value, there are almost too many to choose. Chris Paul? Absolutely. Any of the various Tkachuks? Yep. Simultaneous radio gadfly and failing basketball coach Doug Gottlieb? Ask any Fox Sports Radio commuter trapped in traffic or Wisconsin-Green Bay basketball fan. Los Angeles-era Bill Simmons on anything? Game, set and match.
No, the nuisance here is the glorification of nuisance as an acceptable commercial tool of human interaction. When longtime radio sports chatista Jim Rome, who is not a nuisance, invented the catchphrase "Have a take, don't suck" decades ago, everyone who found him appealing seized on the first part and only a few heeded the second. Having a take has become its own reward, of course, but sucking is not only optional but encouraged as long as the suck is aimed at someone we don't like.
Nuisance takes multiple forms and thrives in almost any environment, which is why it is like kudzu. But all of it has a unifying basic structure: It lures the targeted victim into thinking about the nuisance itself. The solution is in deciding to reject the initial lure.
Take comedian Bill Maher, who may be an annoyance but is not in and of himself a nuisance. You can always opt out of watching Bill Maher and he won't stalk you while you're shopping to demand your attention. At least, we don't think so. Or the notion of traffic itself; there is typically available public transport or work-from-home schemes to evade that, though if those options aren't available, you have yourself a full-on nuisance.
The same is true of that old chestnut of oldey-worldy times, the all-star game. They were at one point a nuisance because they sat there every year in the same stolid formation, promoted as a way to honor the elite in a special event that showed off their eliteness, but that hasn't been true in years. In football, players simply opted out of them. In basketball, they simply became lazy skills competitions by second-level players nobody asked for, and a game that barely reached scrimmage-level intensity. In baseball, it's just a way to tick off contract bonus clauses. In hockey, the notion is now only occasional, replaced by nationalism one fight at a time.
It's all why people now only reference all-star games to slag them, and why they have descended from nuisance to irrelevance, which in many ways for the promoters is considerably worse.
No, nuisance requires an inability to escape. Nuisance chases you and prevents you from leaving. Nuisance is a Super Bowl ad, because it is there even if you eschew Super Bowl parties in which people watch the ads and talk about them ad incommodum; they attack if you're along and minding your own business. Nuisance is what Aaron Rodgers became and may reinvent itself with his next gig, but he is not a nuisance now because he is currently out of sight, out of fight.
In a broader sense, the Dallas Cowboys are a nuisance because they are decreed to possess import in any context for any reason, just because there's an audience for it. Or that's what we're told by frightened producers being told that by their nitwit bosses, who know nothing about the process except what used to be true. For the international equivalent, see Manchester United.
In a bigger context, nuisance is the internet and all its infernal tendrils, because it first created and then destroyed curiosity in the hunt to monetize it. Nuisance is even the news because in performing its increasingly limited duty, it inevitably guides you to the ongoing Turkmenistan-ization of our current kleptocracy. The new regime is all nuisance and no nuance, creating, distributing and even exporting nuisance as the be-all and end-all of their existence.
But there we go, being a nuisance in pursuit of defining nuisance. So let's do it this way. The Kansas City Chiefs were a party, then an annoyance, and now a full-blown nuisance sponsored by an insurance company, while the New York Yankees have seemingly been a nuisance since Babe Ruth. Shaquille O'Neal on the set of Inside the NBA is an occasional delight with bursts of mild annoyance, while Shaquille O'Neal in a commercial for nearly anything is a nuisance. And Tom Brady is a nuisance in perpetuity with oak leaf clusters, en route to becoming a downsized version of Elon Musk, and we know what special department of hell that will earn him.
