The world is a much smaller place than it was to our parents. Everything is a known commodity now or, at least, thought to be. Very few things, events and people get through the cracks. It doesn’t really matter if it’s a good or bad thing either. All things, with the ease of accessibility the Internet provides, makes it a pretty good time to be alive — for the most part.
There are a few ways in which our parents benefited from having a larger world, though. One of them was the romanticization of athletes.
Before satellite and cable providers allowed us to have hundreds upon hundreds of channels and a precursor to a time when the Internet allowed information, videos, and everything under the sun to be shared instantaneously, athletes from other states and cities would have a mythology built for them by second-hand accounts
, local media, and the few highlights a pre-ESPN world would have available for a national public.
The mythology surrounding an out-of-town player would usually be built to otherworldly levels, if only because there wasn’t anyone outside the people who saw him play who could argue otherwise. It is essentially the complete opposite of today, when everyone can see Player X play. There’s no way any mysterious type of origin story can be built for the player, flowing from a lack of access and glorified accounts by others.
Despite those days being long gone, and mostly for the better, there are times it would be refreshing to be surprised to see how great a player is instead of being numb to it because of the 24/7 sports news cycle.
For me, at least, I still had one player I was lucky enough to view as a throwback to the days before online hyperbole and hypersaturated coverage. No, he isn’t from a power program or a guy I have seen play every single time he has stepped on the court.
For lack of a better, more appropriate introduction, Green Bay Phoenix scoring machine Keifer Sykes is that man — and sadly, his time as one of the best players play basketball is over.
We aren’t here to mourn the end of a great college basketball career, though. Rather, we’re here to celebrate all things that Sykes brought to the table, some of which were caused by the indirect decision to play for a program in the Horizon League.
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For those still unaware of his exploits, Sykes is a slender, six-feet-tall, isolation-heavy guard. The moment he stepped foot on a college floor, he became a must-watch for hoopheads. He was a member of the Horizon All Newcomer of the year team as a freshman and is leaving college as a two-time Horizon Player of the Year. Still, none of those facts do Sykes justice.
I can’t lie, though. I didn’t truly understand how good a player Sykes was until he was a sophomore. Even then, I wasn’t really sure how good he would become. By the time he was a junior, if there were any doubt before, it was now all gone: He averaged 20 points per game and did so by playing a style of basketball that is most similar to that of Allen Iverson — in all the good ways.
That’s only part of the Keifer Sykes story. What did it for me, and maybe me alone, was that his games were not so easy to view. Living in the Northeast, while only having a few free hours each day and not being able to regularly find Green Bay games when I did, getting to watch Sykes play ended up feeling more like an event than just a regular basketball game.
That didn’t turn me off. Not having easy access to his games the same way I could watch any team for a power program actually made it better. At the time I didn’t appreciate it, but I think I do now… not to mention that when I did get to see him play, this gifted athlete never disappointed. Sykes was like a special treat, specifically for me, granted to my eyes by the basketball gods, but only to be awarded in small doses.
It wasn’t just his play. This can’t be stressed enough. Without being able to fully quantify what it exactly was, I will still give it a shot. It was a combination of his play, with the excitement of getting to see him play because those opportunities were so few and far between, coupled with the feeling that Sykes was my hidden secret — kind of like that local band you love until it becomes so nationally popular that you feel like it sold out.
That last part isn’t even true. Sykes wasn’t a tippy-top-secret in the land of college basketball. Most fans have watched him play. Many have written about his exploits. Moreover, it was not as though he hasn’t be recognized by the national media over the last few seasons. Still, it felt like it.
Even the simple task of talking about Sykes on social media would result in more surprises. As you would sit there, bang away on your keyboard and tell the free-world how they need to watch this (not really) unknown marvel play hoops, someone will chime in.
@JosephNardone I call him the Horiverson
— Stockton Shorts (@StocktonShorts) March 10, 2015
It shouldn’t have surprised me that someone outside myself knew of Sykes, but I was still pumped to have someone say something as awesome as that. That’s a nickname for him I wish I came up with.
Nicknames aside, though, I suppose the feeling I developed about Keifer Sykes is that feeling someone might get when he goes to college and mentions an obscure movie or band he likes, and out of nowhere someone else not only says he likes it too, but goes all in with added factoids or opinions you had no idea about. Like, did me and “John Stockton’s Shorts” just become best friends?
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I was really hoping Green Bay won last night so I could have done a Keifer Sykes is awesome article and propped up his mythology to proper levels before the Big Dance. (Editor’s Note: The editor wishes William & Mary and St. Francis-Brooklyn had won their conference tournaments. HE would have written stories about THOSE events. Insert sad emoji.)
Maybe it’s better off Sykes didn’t win, though — not for him, of course, but for us. Without Green Bay ever making a Division I NCAA Tournament, a large cross-section of casual basketball fans have never heard of him and will never hear about him. They will never understand how awesome, fun and all the other positive adjectives it was to take in a game in which he played.
The mysteriousness surrounding a special athlete will remain. The seal will not be broken. There’s something richly romantic about that. A cherished feeling from a bygone era will remain intact. You don’t get that very often in modern sports.
Words can’t describe how fun it was to watch Sykes over the last four years. Maybe there isn’t. Maybe that’s even the point. On the morning after Green Bay’s loss, it feels like an end of an era. An end of a run for one of the last big-world players in a small-world place. Keifer Sykes was so good, in a time that should not accommodate his story. It is remarkable to the point that there are no words in the dictionary to correctly and fully articulate it.
Prove me wrong if you want. I’ll be happy to read everything about his career. It will just add to his forever-growing mythology — and I’m okay with that. Hell, I think I prefer it.
