If you’re reading this on mobile, then you’re already at risk of Doc Rivers yelling at you — or worse.
Cell-phone culture has changed over the years, but one rule has remained steadfast: Try your best not to take personal calls and messages when you’re at the office, especially in the middle of a meeting. How bad does that look, right?
Well, if arenas are the offices of NBA players and if meetings are just games and practices, then it appears players are committing the cardinal sin more often than many might realize. As Andrew Keh of the New York Times chronicles, players are checking their phones at halftime a whole bunch these days. What used to be shielded from the outside world, has infiltrated the locker room now. And it’s not just happening in the middle of games, either.
Current Hornets and former Celtics big man Al Jefferson felt the burn once:
Al Jefferson, Hawes’s teammate on the Hornets, recalled being cursed out by Doc Rivers 11 years ago in his own rookie season with the Boston Celtics for daring to check his messages before tipoff.
“I’m still not a big fan of people checking their phones at halftime,” Jefferson said as he sat with his feet in a bucket of ice, fiddling with his phone, after a recent game. “But times change. Cellphones are people’s life now.”
Even a young Big Al, who claims he isn’t a big fan of using phones at halftime, is checking texts before tipoff. And that was more than a decade ago, during a time when phones weren’t nearly as pervasive in our culture as they are today.
He couldn’t have been checking Twitter. Or Instagram. Heck, he couldn’t have even had an iPhone. None of those technologies existed 11 years ago.
Maybe with all the addictive programming cell phones have today, it’s more worth it. But it’d be fun to ask Big Al now, are you glad you glanced away from basketball to perfect your t9word skills?
(Via New York Times)
