VLVL2 (15): "a story of transcendent courage"

[dedalus204 at comcast.net]

377.32:  "The Movie at Nine, more than the usual basketball epic, was a story of transcendent courage on the part of the gallant but doomed L.A. Lakers, as they struggled under hellish and subhuman conditions at Boston Garden against an unscupulous foe, hostile referees, and fans whose behavior might have shamed their mothers had their mothers not been right there, screaming epithets, ruining Laker free throws, sloshing beer on their children in moments of high emotion, already.  To be fair, the producers had tried their best to make the Celtics look good.  Besides Sidney Poitier as K.C. Jones, there was Paul McCartney, in his first acting role, as Kevin McHale, with Sean Penn as Larry Bird.  On the Laker side were Lou Gossett, Jr., as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Michael Douglas as Pat Riley, and Jack Nicholson as himself."


Yesterday I posted a few links on this particular championship series.  Having never fostered even the remotest interest in basketball despite the '90s era Chicago Bulls (who, I am to understand, are today slightly less skilled), I find most striking the "epic" terminology through which Pynchon conveys this particular match-up: "transcendent courage," "gallant but doomed," "struggled under hellish and subhuman conditions," "an unscupulous foe," "hostile."

Coming shortly after a confrontation between Brock Vond and Prairie -- themselves symbolic of two differing eras and ideologies, might this epic terminology not also apply to the main narrative?

Additionally, as we've seen throughout the novel Pynchon places actors in the roles of real peoples' life stories (the juxtaposition of low/high often being the gag), and I wonder if the gag is here the same, or perhaps slightly different.  Since professional athletes frequently convey a certain "persona" that makes them unique to the team (Dennis Rodman's "bad boy," I suppose), I wonder if the author has chosen actors whose (typical) roles don't somehow relate to the athletes' roles in this particular context (whether parallel or converse).

If so, this perhaps adds some dimension to the gag.