More often than not, I can be seen wearing a hat repping my NBA team of choice — the Boston Celtics. Besides following in the footsteps of my father’s fandom and admiring the brilliant intensity of players like Jaylen Brown and Kevin Garnett, I am captured by the wonderfully wacky human being that is Joe Mazzulla.
For those who are unfamiliar, Mazzulla has been the head coach of the Celtics since 2022 and is perhaps best known outside of basketball activities for the intensity with which he carries himself. After being asked how far he thinks he’d run in a marathon, Mazzulla answered matter-of-factly, “I would just go until I die.”
“The biggest thing that we rob people of, from an entertainment standpoint, is you can’t fight anymore,” Mazzulla said, advocating for the allowance of bench-clearing brawls in the NBA. “I wish you could bring back fighting.”
Thinking past the almost comical machismo of his mannerisms, I think there is plenty to learn from Mazzulla’s all-too-serious approach to adulthood.
One of my personal favorite Mazzulla-isms is a response to questions surrounding the potential pressure of defending the NBA championship title. Shunning the notion of pressure as a disruption, Mazzulla declared he hoped for the bid at a second straight championship to be “10 times harder” than the initial climbing of the mountain.
“People are going to say the target is on our back, but I hope it’s right on our forehead in between our eyes. I hope I can see the red dot,” Mazzulla said.
Thinking past the almost comical machismo of his mannerisms, I think there is plenty to learn from Mazzulla’s all-too-serious approach to adulthood. We are often tempted to consider our experiences as banal and unworthy of appreciation; however, I believe a rekindling of the stakes of child’s play can allow us to seize the reins of our own meaning-making.
To illustrate what I mean by bringing back the stakes of play, I’d like to turn to the works of MF DOOM (DOOM) and De La Soul. Through their hip-hop explorations of imagination and narrativizing lived experience, one can glean insights into how to make one’s own life feel worthwhile.
At the core of DOOM’s artistic philosophy is an awareness of the merits of performance. Aside from his music, DOOM is best known for his enigmatic personality exemplified by his omnipresent silver mask. The choice in accessory correlates with his frequent fixation on cartoons and supervillain narratives, oft sampled in his music. DOOM used texts from childhood to fashion himself a public-facing identity — complimenting the youthful, carefree connotation of cartoons with the serious, grounded nature of his music and artistic identity.
De La Soul’s whimsical soundscapes are stuffed to the gills with nearly more sound effects and thematic story-crafting than can be counted. The group’s eclectic use of sampling pairs beautifully with the inclusion of framed narratives within their albums — especially 1989’s “3 Feet High and Rising” and 1991’s “De La Soul is Dead.” Notably, their use of referential elements proved a commercial challenge at the dawn of the streaming age, as it took decades to get samples cleared for the group’s consequential early work to be uploaded to streaming platforms.
The motivation for my inclusion of De La Soul stems from their delicate balance between the hardcore hip-hop of the 90s and the sharp awareness of the music’s potential to vitalize the lived experience of the ordinary.
The motivation for my inclusion of De La Soul stems from their delicate balance between the hardcore hip-hop of the 90s and the sharp awareness of the music’s potential to vitalize the lived experience of the ordinary. I direct the reader to the “Intro” from “De La Soul Is Dead.” The schoolyard talk — quips like “now I’ve got the new De La Soul tape!” and insults like “butt crust” — harkens back to a paradoxical time where, though the responsibilities of mortgages and pension funds laid unapproached, it felt as though times were just as, if not more, serious than adulthood.
Similarly, I am transported back to many a strip from Bill Waterson’s brilliant “Calvin and Hobbes.” Waterson examines the happenings of school-aged Calvin and his stuffed tiger Hobbes — along with a lovely palette of other characters and personas — while, above all, displaying a sincere reverence for the playfully delicate vision of his eponymous characters. In my view, Calvin and Hobbes are placed on an equal plane and rapport with the author, rather than relegation to a state of dollhood to Waterson’s puppeteering.
The thread I see connecting each of these examples together is a shared recognition of the power of novelty and wonder in establishing a sense of belonging. I think one could easily critique Mazzulla’s over-the-top intensity as childlike; but, I believe this (comically) inflated seriousness and attention to craft is something to be envied, not berated. Like Calvin, DOOM, De La Soul and others, we must hope to be as invested and in love with our particular processes to give way to a fantasy of daily life.
