cool, smart young cat, mid-twentys, watches basketball

he knew he played baseball, but thought it was after

said he didnt study Jordan like that

hmm

that night i asked young dude at the store, he said the same thing

91-96 was 25-30 years ago,
is knowing about the career of Jordan today really like us knowing about the career of Bill Russell back then?

i guess, but we wasnt wearing Russells and seeing his games on ESPN either

my 14yo said even Space Jam tells you that

I’m a generation Xer, and as you know, the Internet didn’t exist in the 80s,
so the main resources on the history of sports was a Sports Almanac
,an Encyclopedia, and sports cards.

As teenagers we were oblivious to how many titles a team won back in
60s or 70s. It was just simply a generation gap, and we were just focused on
the current state of sports, and we weren’t interested in old former players.

During the era of Walter Payton and Tony Dorsett, my father would always speak
about Jim Brown. I wasn’t trying to hear it, and nor did I care. Now, in this time,
I have taken on the role of my father telling adolescents about Payton and Dorsett,
and all they want to talk about is Kamara and McCaffery.

But, as I got older, and started studying the history of sports, I gained a true
realization of Jim Brown’s greatness. That happened in my late 20s.
The same thing will happen with this generation of adolescents. As they mature
and watch footage on Jordan, they will have a true understanding of his greatness
and the amount of trophies he won.

when they asked what my favorite album was. To me that's a fairly recent album, being that it came out when i was in 10th grade. Then I realized none of them were even alive on the planet at the time, this includes the "adult" 18 year olds. Our brains just have trouble with accepting time. I'm sure I was the same way with my dad's Bill Ocean albums. Shit is cray.

I was furious when they said that shit

Shit, any Kanye pre-808s and Heartbreak is old school to kids entering high school today.

We're fucking old, man.

latest album this year and they called him an “old school” rapper. I was blown away by that, and joked that they definitely don’t know Jay Z. Blank stares. I was like “Beyoncé’s husband?” and they only kinda knew Beyoncé - like not directly but the same way we knew Aretha Franklin as kid.

We OLD old.

*grabs my soul*

head hurt.

And they have way more access to information than we did.

almost feels like a distant third behind Jordan retiring/returning and the quick rise/fall of the Magic.

>almost feels like a distant third behind Jordan
>retiring/returning and the quick rise/fall of the Magic.

this was a few years ago (he was 11/12) and I chided his fool ass and sent him along his way to do the lessons. he soon realized the fallacy of that argument.

unlike the 60s and 70s, there is more footage of 80s and 90s basketball for those who weren't around to get themselves learned up. no doubt it would change our perspective if we had the same access.

the past, but it's because on 2K he likes playing with and against all time great teams. So he has Kareem as the GOAT center, Oscar Robertson as his favorite point guard, and argues that Elgin Baylor was as good or better than Bron...

He doesn't have actual context for how they played in their eras since he hasn't watched that. So for example playing with Wilt in 2k having him go up against prime Shaq isn't the same as Wilt from back then going up against the average centers of his era.

For them it's easy for them to not be up on this type of nuance. He retired and came back twice, so I could see someone from that generation missing that and thinking he played baseball after winning 6 chips, and came back with the Wizards.

Also regarding your 14 year old, I'm assuming the cat you met was older than that. The reason your 14 year old (and my 13 year old) know Space Jam is because they are children of kids who loved Space Jam back in the 90s. I can definitely see some one 20-25 or so not being up on Space Jam at all. Also at that age Jordan would have been FULLY retired by the time they started watching basketball.

An equivalent would be someone from our generation, when we were 20 or so, mixing up the order of team Wilt played for. Yeah if we know basketball we should know that it was the Globetrotters, Warriors, 76ers, Lakers, but I could definitely see someone mixing it up because to them it's all "the past".

and recognize their greatness. I get it.

Was there a GOAT before Jordan though?

it was 11 out of 13, so close enough. I've also met people my age who think Wilt has 0 or 1 championships. These were all pretty big basketball fans too. Details just get lost in the mix when they happened before you were born. It happens.

He said he's never owned a CD.

I asked my next five students, they all said the same.

One time, a couple years ago, I referenced Seinfeld to a classroom of my high school students, and *zero* of them knew what Seinfeld was.

Old shit is old, man. They don't care, lol. Kids these days know Jordan as the shoe guy and a guy who was great in their parents' day. Anything beyond that is like asking me to say shit about Wilt other than "he scored 100 points once and fucked a lot of ladies."

>He said he's never owned a CD.
>
>I asked my next five students, they all said the same.
>
>One time, a couple years ago, I referenced Seinfeld to a
>classroom of my high school students, and *zero* of them knew
>what Seinfeld was.
>
>Old shit is old, man. They don't care, lol. Kids these days
>know Jordan as the shoe guy and a guy who was great in their
>parents' day. Anything beyond that is like asking me to say
>shit about Wilt other than "he scored 100 points once and
>fucked a lot of ladies."

during MJ/Kobe debates, he always talked about how he youtubed Jordan's career for his analysis. I loved that guy lol.

when i was in high school i knew what fuckin MASH was

maybe it's because syndicated TV isnt a thing anymore, but teenagers being entirely ignorant of major cultural touchstones of the last 25 years seems like more than just us being old

>when i was in high school i knew what fuckin MASH was
>
>maybe it's because syndicated TV isnt a thing anymore, but
>teenagers being entirely ignorant of major cultural
>touchstones of the last 25 years seems like more than just us
>being old
>
>

nah, that's just syndication. It was kinda easy to be aware of all the major TV shows that came before us cause there were just 3 channels until we were kids. If you watched a little bit of TV Land then you knew everything your parents watched more or less. But now, not only is syndication not really a thing, everything just moves super fucking fast. Hundreds of channels plus all the streaming services. It's impossible to keep up with everything that's current, let alone stuff that came before. People suggest a new show to me and I say "I'll have to catch that sometime," I blink and there's already 8 seasons and the finale is about to air.

On one hand, all the streaming, YouTube, Twitch, TikTok... we just weren't able to distract ourselves with new content the same way kids are today. Same with music, really-- they have everything at their fingertips, and we only really had what was available.

There are certainly kids today who listen to way more music than I did and watch way more old movies than I did solely because of access too... but those kids are definitely the exception, not the rule.

That said, I bet most kids didn't know anything about MASH beyond "MASH was a TV show." And most of them had no idea what Barney Miller was or SOAP or some of the other monster shows from two decades prior. I do think relative ignorance of cultural touchstones is to be expected via the generation gap, even if our generation maybe had a *fraction* more awareness of at least the *existence* of those touchstones.

Three stooges, little rascals, honeymooners, those were some of my
favorite shows as a kid, kid. Those shows came out 20 years
before I was born.

Also, throw Charlie Chaplin in there as a person we followed as children, and
Charlie Chaplin movies came out in the 20s/30s.

We knew about those movies/shows because they showed them on the regular tv channels, and there weren’t a lot of TV channels back then, so every generation was
watching the same stuff. We grew up watching the same shows that our parents
grew up watching.

That’s not the case now, because there are just so many platforms of entertainment
to choose from, so everyone is not watching the same channels or tv shows.
And the big networks don’t show classic movies and TV shows like they used to,
so younger generations don’t get exposed to them.

In order for younger generations to learn about the shows that we grew up
watching and that our parents grew up watching, it has to be an intentional action.
We would have to introduce it to them , as opposed to it just being naturally
available to them to discover on their own.

he didn’t believe it..

i cant think of many other NBA players revered like that

ie my nephew (17) loves kobe, and so does my 65 year old uncle

edit, maybe jordan but more for the shoes

My young students love Denzel just like i did just like my parents did. Its crazy how he is one of the only actors to never ever fall off. Ever.