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In the Washington Post, Will Leitch argued that it’s these moments courtside, in the throes of a typical sports fan’s insanity, hugging, screaming, wigging out, when we see stars like Timothée Chalamet and Ben Stiller for real. In specifically considering Chalamet’s enthusiasm during the Knicks run, however, Defector’s Diana Moskovitz was a bit more circumspect. “As for how much of this is real versus how much of this is performance, that is always a question, especially with someone who makes a living by being charming, present, and giving people what they want.” Even so, she concluded: “But who are we to judge?” I’m not judging, not exactly, but the question of the line between those two still intrigues me. Indeed, my man David Thomson waded into this topic in his book “Why Acting Matters,” pondering where those lines between onscreen and offscreen selves blurred and where they dissolved completely. He didn’t write about actors sitting courtside at basketball games, mind you, but it’s at basketball arenas where those two selves seem to become most spellbindingly muddled.
It’s appropriate. The basketball court, after all, is a place for performance as much as competition. And not just in the dark arts of exaggerating to draw fouls. No, I’m talking about trash talk, frequently referred to by its practitioners as an artform, a mind game but also a means of creative expression. Players don’t merely have signature moves but signature taunts and celebrations. In a league newly built on the back of three-pointers, the ones who shoot them best, from the Knicks’ Jalen Brunson to league MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander of the Oklahoma City Thunder, all have their own post three-point celebratory gestures. And when the Pacers completed an improbable comeback in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Finals against the Knicks to send the game to overtime (where they would ultimately win), upon hitting the three-point shot that completed it, Tyrese Haliburton backpedaled and looked to the crowd while putting his hands to his neck, the universal sign of “choking,” as in, the Knicks, your Knicks, had succumbed to the pressure.
Haliburton’s choke gesture was a conscious echo of another Indiana Pacer, Reggie Miller, from over 30 years ago. Miller not only made the choke gesture; he directed it at Spike Lee, the Knicks superfan who spent all of Game 5 in the 1994 Eastern Conference Finals jawing at the Pacers star from his Madison Square Garden courtside seat. As Miller himself said in “Winning Time,” the 2010 ESPN documentary chronicling the Knicks/Pacers rivalry, by sitting courtside, Lee wanted to be part of the game and so he obliged him. It suggests courtside celebrities as akin to Parisian café dwellers, both spectators and participants in the action. Indeed, in the 2003 NBA playoff game between the Los Angeles Lakers and San Antonio Spurs, when Lakers fanatic Jack Nicholson stood up from his courtside seat and berated the referees over a foul called on the team’s star Shaquille O’Neal, nearly getting himself ejected, he seemed to be burying himself in the role of a lifetime: Jack Nicholson as Los Angeles Lakers Head Coach. That’s sort of the ultimate manifestation of courtside celebrities, or how we think of courtside celebrities, in a sense playing to the game on the court as the players might play to the crowd. That’s what made Indiana’s T.J. McConnell dragging Chalamet and his lady friend, the Other Kylie, so apropos; if you wanna “play,” you’re gonna pay.
That brings us to Beyoncé. She went viral during Game 3 of the 2019 NBA Finals when she appeared to side-eye Nicole Curran, the wife of Golden State owner Joe Lacob, who was sitting to her left while conversing with Knowles’s husband Jay-Z to her right. This assessment of the situation was immediately denounced by Beyoncé’s publicist and anyway, that phony drama doesn’t pique my interest. Lost in all that hullabaloo was the moment at the start of the third quarter of the same game when Beyoncé and Jay-Z were ushered to their courtside seats a few moments after the second half had begun. Because the game was already in progress, the two stars had to wait until the action was at the other end of the court, meaning they strode to their seats in full view of the crowd and TV audience while the players were playing the NBA Finals. And yet, ineffably, you could feel every eye in the house drawn away from the game and to these two celebrities.
Jay-Z, beer in hand, was sort of sauntering in that laid-back I’m Kind of a Big Deal way, performing by trying to make it appear as he if wasn’t performing. Beyoncé, on the other hand, was shrewder. She was just walking to her seat. She could have been anybody if she hadn’t been Beyoncé. But she was Beyoncé. All these other courtside celebrities, consciously or not, are seeking out the camera, spiritually urging the TV control room to cut to them. Beyoncé did no such thing. If certain actors know that acting is being, Beyoncé knew that celebrity was being. Shit, even the Queen had a box at Royal Albert Hall with her name on it. Queen Bey remade the sideline, the court, and the camera in her name without lifting a finger to write it figuratively or literally. Nobody has ever looked more famous.
