Bravery of this Phoenix Sun is blinding on and off the court

AMERICA AT LARGE: THE MOST recent episode came in the waning seconds of Sunday’s NBA play-off game in Phoenix. The Lakers, about to be beaten for the first time in the year’s Western Conference championships, were pressing all over the floor, and when Steve Nash wriggled free to take an inbounds pass, Lakers forward Derek Fisher left his feet in a desperate lunge to intercept the ball.

Suffice it to say if this had been an NFL game, Fisher would have drawn an automatic fine for a helmet-to-helmet hit. But this was basketball, and nobody was wearing helmets. Although it was plainly the result of aggressive play on the part of both men, the collision precisely mirrored one I witnessed outside a Glasgow pub after closing time years ago. When Fisher drove his head into Nash’s nose, the splintering of bone and the grinding of cartilage was audible on television sets around the country.

But it wasn’t the inadvertent head-butt that defined this one as another Steve Nash moment, rather, the player’s reaction to it.

When he (painfully, no doubt) hauled himself to his feet, it became apparent Nash’s nose was pointed in the approximate direction of his right ear. Suns trainer Aaron Nelson raced onto the court to offer assistance, but before he could even get there Nash had reached up and, with a television camera right in his face, snapped his proboscis back into place. He shook his woozy head a couple of times and then, waving Nelson back to the bench, headed for the foul line.

In the ensuing head-on shot of Nash at the free-throw line, the nose resembled a blob of modelling clay. On the other hand, his right eye, which had been elbowed by San Antonio’s Tim Duncan a few weeks earlier, looked almost, though not quite, human. The once gruesome purple had given way to green.

That injury hadn’t driven Nash off the court, either, even though he played the entire second half of the play-off win over the Spurs with the eye swollen shut.

In that Sunday night game, by the way, the Phoenix players were sporting their sort-of-bilingual “Los Suns” jerseys, a move encouraged by Nash and his multicultural team-mates as a protest against Arizona’s new immigration law, which codified regulations pretty much mirroring those of South Africa during the apartheid era. (And, come to think of it, it was a response to apartheid that led Nash’s parents to move with their infant son from Johannesburg to Victoria, British Columbia, almost 35 years ago.)

The latest injury, “a minimally displaced nasal fracture with displaced cartilage”, was repaired via non-invasive surgery on Monday, and on Tuesday night Nash was back on the court as the Suns defeated the defending champions 115-106 to even the series at 2-2 going into tonight’s game in Phoenix. That he logged just 30 minutes in Game Four was more attributable to early foul trouble than to the nose.

I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for athletes in any sport who are the guys with the dirtiest uniforms and the floor-burns from diving after loose balls. Usually the fellows who exhibit these traits are those with less natural talent than their colleagues, who have managed to reach the uppermost levels of their given sport by going the extra mile in sheer hustle. The bona fide superstar who exhibits these characteristics is a rarer animal still, but Nash fits into this latter category.

It would be inaccurate to describe him as underappreciated, either in the US (he’s a seven-time All-Star and a two-time NBA MVP) or in his adoptive homeland. He was one of four Canadians chosen to light the Olympic Torch in Vancouver this winter, and has to be the leader in the clubhouse for Canada’s Sportsman of the Year.

That said, Nash would be worthy of our admiration if he never dribbled another ball or threw another no-look pass. Ours is an age in which matters of conscience are easily subsumed by marketing considerations, and political stances, when they exist at all, are coloured by contractual status.

From the outset Nash put himself on the line, criticising Canada’s participation in the ill-fated adventure in Afghanistan long before it became fashionable to do so. He became a lightning rod for criticism with his stance on the war in Iraq as early as 2003, when he wore a T-shirt reading “No War. Shoot for Peace” to the All-Star game in Atlanta.

It was a particularly courageous stance, since Nash at the time played for the Dallas Mavericks in George W Bush’s home state. Nash reported the response was, all in all, positive, although he encountered taunts ranging from “Why don’t you just shut your mouth and stick to basketball?” to “Go back to Canada!”

The latter came mostly from the same people who have been known to taunt African American athletes by waving bananas while telling them to “Go back to Africa”.

There is some delicious irony at play here, in that while 79 per cent of NBA players are men of colour, primarily African Americans, Nash is one of a handful who was born in Africa.

You’d have to say that when it comes to Iraq, history has made Nash, at least among basketball players, a prophet.

As for the Arizona immigration bill, it has been so widely criticised by everyone from President Obama on down I’ve often found myself wondering who could be for it?

But then yesterday, while I was still mulling over my reaction to watching Nash rearrange his schnozz, I chanced upon a dissenting opinion from the neo-con examiner.com columnist DK Jamaal, himself an Afro-American, which demonstrates, if nothing else, that xenophobia, stupidity and intolerance are not the exclusive province of the American Redneck: describing the Phoenix players who made their statement with the jerseys they wore in Game Three as the “Lost Suns”, Jamaal reserved particular venom for Nash, whom he described as “an overrated Canadian point guard”.

The stop-and-frisk-for citizenship papers policy mandated by the Arizona law is a national embarrassment almost certain to be struck down on Constitutional grounds at the first serious court challenge, but, wrote Jamaal in its defence, “70 per cent of Arizonans support the law. 60 per cent of Americans support the law. I don’t know how the law has been greeted internationally, nor do I care”.

That Steve Nash does care is even more admirable than the broken nose.