[devane617]

Yep. Guns and Rap are slowly creeping from Basketball to Football. Basketball is a lost cause IMHO. I hope the NFL stops it before it is too late.

[Loud Mime]

Tattoos and thuggery; are they related?

[Hardastarboard]

Basketball is a lost cause IMHO

Not just your, HO, unfortunately. What a pity, it was the most active, atheltic of all the major sports, IMHO. Too bad the fools who play it ruined it.

[Paleo Conservative]

Yep. Guns and Rap are slowly creeping from Basketball to Football. Basketball is a lost cause IMHO. I hope the NFL stops it before it is too late.

Consider that the NFL did nothing to discipline Ray Lewis.

[LS]

Basketball isn't lost yet. (See: PHX SUNS!!) Besides being a Suns fan, I think culturally their success is absolutely critical to the sport. If they can win the NBA championship, it will send a message that "thug ball" is not necessary to success.

[Colonel Kangaroo]

I don't think basketball is in worse shape than football. It may even be in better shape, especially when you look at the vast sport beyond the NBA. It just doesn't strike the publics attention much because in football you have the distant figures covered in body armor obscuring some of the personality of the sport. Also we don't have foreign countries highlighting the decline of US football by beating us because most of the rest of the world doesn't really care about US football.

As far as thuggery and "robust" living, it's always been a part of many ballplayers' lives, be it football, basketball, baseball, etc. Whites, blacks, it doesn't matter. A lot of ballplayers have always lived dangerously. It's just that society today as a whole is more dangerous, decedent and prey to harmful pop culture fads.