Steve Nash

Yes, I'm a Phoenix Suns fan, have been since we moved here in 1994. But I've been an avid Suns fan, a rabid Suns fan since the Suns acquired Steve Nash, the man with the skills of a magician. I recently stumbled onto this short essay about Nash and thought it was so good I just had to share it with other fans of round ball.

“Thesis: Steve Nash Is God,” Brian Doyle, editor Portland Magazine

Consider the evidence. He’s having arguably the best season of his career, at the age of 1,000—a better season than he had when he was the most valuable player in the league not once but twice—the smallest player since Allen Iverson. He’s actually better with age, and how often can you say that? His team will make the playoffs again, as they have every year with Nash at the controls, except for The Failed Shaq Experiment Year, which I remember best for Nash’s patient misery at the press conference. He’s still arguably the best point guard in the world, a remarkable statement, considering that he’s older than Chris Paul, Deron Williams, Tony Parker, and Rajon Rondo collectively. (To see what a great point guard looks like when he does not get better with age, watch Jason Kidd.) Nash reportedly eats absolutely no sugar, just like God. He went to a Jesuit university, just like God. Unlike many of the other men who work in his profession, he has a sense of humor and can write his name, just like God. A normal human being, faced with the loss of Shawn Marion and saddled with the reboundless Amare Stoudemire, would be bitter, and excoriate management, and demand to be traded, and be arrested in the company of women named Bambi and Sparkl, and contemplate accepting a trade to the Clippers, or playing professional soccer in British Columbia, but no, Nash trundles along, getting better and better. He has children, just like God. He lives in a place filled with light, just like God. He is the premier creator of his era, just like God. He has no peers, really, not even in the pantheon of unbelievably great smaller players, the heaven that includes Tiny Archibald and Bob Cousy and Allen Iverson, because he is a better passer than any of them, and has invented more new wrinkles for passing than even Cousy, who invented passing just after the world was born. Nash was signed to a new contract for a raise at age 35, in a business with absolutely no mercy for fading skills, even if you are Tim Duncan or Larry Bird or Michael Jordan. People say o my god! when they watch him play. People lean forward when he gets the ball and the break begins, because they might see something they have never seen before, which is exactly why we love basketball, and exactly the feeling you have when you have those little rippling epiphanies here and there about the nature of creation in the largest arena, as it were, which is not in Phoenix, but is rife with Suns. I rest my case.