The art of sports memes
The NBA has established itself as the premier meme enterprise in the world of professional athletics.
“I got one more in me.” Is this quote a patriotic sentiment of an archival interview with a Vietnam War veteran who is willing to go on another tour of the conflicted country? Or, maybe it is a politician announcing their reelection campaign after teasing their followers with the possibility of retirement. No, it’s Vince Carter, another type of veteran, who was announcing in 2019 that he plans on continuing his NBA career (of which he prolonged by another season). The statement has no connotation when removed from the vacuum of the NBA world. Quotes like Carter’s are nondescript without the context behind it and patrons of social media have leveraged these types of statements into defining a whole new era of meme culture. The same meme culture that retooled the legendary ‘Pepe the Frog’ into a right-wing dog-whistle or the ‘wojack’ into creating a negative foil to hypermasculinity has found a limitless cesspool of resources to push an agenda or state a reaction in words that are not their own, but of professional athletes.
The social media platforms with the largest proliferation of these quote graphic memes are easily X (formerly known as Twitter) and Instagram. There is no formal measure that needs to be done to determine this, but the data backs up the NBA’s dominance over the two forums. According to X’s own business sector that evaluates the popularity of hashtags and topics on the site, #NBATwitter saw over 135 million mentions for the 2021–2022 NBA season; this came out to about “42% of active Twitter users engaging with NBA content in some way.” Instagram was an even bigger source of engagement for the league: “@NBA on Instagram generated more than 13 billion video views this season, the most of any account on the platform.” While much of this popularity is derived from mind-bending athletic feats of excellence captured by 10-second highlights, many are made aware of the NBA’s biggest names through memes.
To understand the social reach of these simple graphics, let’s look at what many consider to be the pinnacle, and potentially the genesis, of this trend. On January 14th, 2021, Houston Rockets’ Christian Wood scored 27 points against the San Antonio Spurs. Wood had been meddling between teams as a two-way player for years prior, but was starting to cement himself as a bonafide NBA-level talent around this period. Shaquille O’Neal, hall-of-famer, legend and TNT color commentator proceeded to give Wood a backhanded compliment: “I wasn’t familiar with your game,” the big-man said to Wood in the post-game interview. Wood responds in jest: “Aw man, you’re a casual,” he says jokingly back to Shaq. This is a seemingly simple exchange between men who have been at the top of the same field at different moments in time, but there are several factors that inflated it into superstar meme level.
Shaq’s celebrity presence is already extremely large; beyond what he did on the court, Shaq has 34 million followers on Instagram and can be seen in non-basketball contexts at all times (i.e. Papa Johns’ commercials, General Insurance commercials, DJing, etc.).
Without hearing the audio and understanding Wood’s playful tone, the interaction sounds more tense and confrontational than it is. This feeds into social media, and humans’, natural attraction to drama and gossip. Many may have been thinking, is this a new beef brewing?
Without even knowing who Shaq and Wood are, the conversation is highly relatable and can be reapplied to numerous other contexts.
Lastly, and probably most importantly, professional sports news aggregators (i.e. Bleacher Report, ESPN) promoted it to their own broad following that is composed of fans of a myriad of other sports. Someone who follows Bleacher Report for football updates may see this on their feed and search for the context themselves, stumbling down a doom-scroll of NBA content.
While these memes seem vapid on the surface, they may serve as an entry point into the league for some younger fans. The aforementioned statistics are apparent in how they highlight the NBA’s overall social media presence, but the users using these platforms skew younger. About 30% of Instagram’s users are Zoomers, with only Millennials rivaling this share; X’s users are nearly 34% Zoomers. Most who have grown up in the Internet era are aware of those who represent the pinnacles of their respective athletic fields through highlights, brand deals and their overall pop-culture prominence: LeBron James, Tiger Woods, Stephen Curry, Lionel Messi, among others. Memes have created a market for younger generations to become aware of the depths of NBA teams’ rosters through their idiosyncratic personalities that are captured by memes that are unrivaled by other sports.
Take the anomaly of Brian Scalabrine that Michael Lee describes in his paper titled “NBA Memes — The Role of Fan Image Macros within the Online NBA Fan Community.” Scalabrine was a career journeyman and bench-warmer during his tenure in the NBA, but grew a cult-like fandom through his association to some of the most prominent teams of his era: the MVP Derrick Rose Chicago Bulls, the 2x NBA Finals runner-up New Jersey Nets and most prominently, the 2008 NBA Champion Boston Celtics. On each of these teams, Scalabrine was among the bottom of the talent pool and would normally be dominated in a popularity contest by the likes of Jason Kidd, Paul Pierce and Derrick Rose, but it was the unremarkable attributes of Scalabrine’s play and unassuming physical demeanor that made him a meme darling.
The meme above was ironically self-aware in nature; during Scalabrine’s time with the Celtics, James was still ringless, a prominent shortcoming within his already established superstardom. Is Scalabrine comparable in skill-level to James? Of course not, but this simple text-image combination set the precedent for how players like Christian Wood could gain notoriety among casual NBA fans and younger, chronically online, generations by inadvertently developing a persona that would define them to onlookers. Wood is still a role-player in the NBA, and there is a higher chance that they are more aware of his aforementioned quote-graphic than the fact he plays for the Los Angeles Lakers. NBA careers are temporary, but memes last forever.