Early in the second quarter of Sunday’s game between the excellent but joyless Boston Celtics and the talented but butt Milwaukee Bucks, Giannis Antetokounmpo kerpowed Jaylen Brown with a high elbow. Giannis had the ball on the block, drove to the defense’s middle, and then attempted to pivot over his left shoulder, throwing out a cartoonishly long and pointy chicken wing to clear some shooting space; Brown, the primary defender, took the blow to the shoulder and head, and went down with a shout. The referees signaled an offensive foul and awarded the ball to the Celtics. Giannis offered Brown a conciliatory handshake and then cruelly yoinked it away, executing the rude “too slow” hair-smoothing maneuver and leaving Brown grasping at air.
Ecclesiastes 3 reminds us that just as there is a time to own someone with a fake handshake, there is a time to, ah, not do that. Once, during my freshman year of high school, I was walking down the hallway between classes and suddenly there was an older kid coming toward me in the hallway, being very cool and outgoing with his friends and high-fiving people as he passed. He saw me and smiled, and said, “Hey, all right, all right,” and lifted his hand, and I lifted mine—for a very brief moment here, I sincerely thought this funny older person was reaching across a social chasm to brighten the day of a hopeless little dipshit freshman—and then he yoinked it away and said, “Ooooh, sorry,” and his friends laughed a little bit cruelly and the group continued on, dishing out high-fives and making people smile. Probably for the rest of my life I will be haunted by the possibility that his entire routine down that hallway had been about pranking and humiliating me specifically. For altering the trajectory of my life with a single swing of the arm, for showing me a glimpse of divine light and then replacing it with permanent emotional disfigurement, you simply have to hand it to him. His timing was absolutely impeccable.
It is certainly very brazen to pull a fake handshake on someone whose skull is still ringing from contact with your ill-intentioned elbow. Brown, who did not seem all that excited to shake hands in the first place, was certainly not amused, and when Giannis went in for a real handshake seconds later, Brown declined, with a glance at Giannis that would’ve impaled his brain if it’d had a physical point. The two never did make up.
The game remained chippy. In the third quarter, with the Celtics biting into Milwaukee’s halftime lead, Giannis closed out recklessly on a Jayson Tatum jump shot from the corner, took away Tatum’s landing space, and was not whistled for what should’ve been an automatic flagrant foul. In the fourth quarter, with the score knotted, Giannis took a swing pass at the top of the key and drove down the lane; Brown, alert to the threat, bounced out above the restricted arc and then clobbered the bejeezus out of Giannis in midair. Giannis tumbled to the court, his flailing shot missed badly, and the officials consulted the replay monitor and hit Brown with a Flagrant 1 penalty. A minute later the Celtics grabbed the lead for good, and won 116–110, dropping the miserable Bucks to 2–8, 14th in the Eastern Conference, a half-game better than the rebuilding Toronto Raptors and a full game worse than the insanely horrible Washington Wizards.
Magnanimity, according to Aristotle, is the perfection of each virtue. You must think of your triumphs as arising from the preponderance of virtues; victory is therefore a showcase of virtue, a display, which naturally would include nobility of character, a magnitude of soul-goodness that would automatically preclude pettiness. I would like for Brown to think about this when he considers his response to Giannis’s fake handshake, after the game. “Giannis is a child,” Brown snorted, suppressing a mirthless smirk. “I’m just focused on helping my team get a win.”
Giannis was surprised that his jape didn’t go off as he expected, and was put in the awkward position of having to explain it from the postgame lectern, as the superstar face of the team with the second-worst record in the entire damn league. “It’s a joke,” he said, explaining that he and Brown usually do some goofing whenever they face each other. “We’re playing basketball, and at the same time, you’ve got to have fun while playing … I think we always kind of joke around, within the flow of the game.”
“It’s something that I do with my kids,” said Giannis, probably failing to note that usually he is not pranking his children immediately after having leveled them with a brutal head shot. Antetokounmpo was taken aback by the news that Brown called him a child. “Oh, he said I was a child? This is who I am. I play the game with fun, joy … He took offense to it?” The reporter repeated Brown’s quote to a troubled, increasingly sheepish Giannis. “I try to surround myself with young people so I can stay young.” Is it the influence of children that causes Giannis to behave, as Brown alleged, like a child? Is a hint of the dreaded Dwight Howarditis creeping into Antetokounmpo’s on-court demeanor? Could Brown stand to take himself approximately 200 percent less seriously? Clearly this must be settled by Brown smuggling a joy buzzer onto the court when these teams next cross paths, on Dec. 6.
