Brandon Roy comes off a high screen driving to his right into the middle of the court. The Phoenix post defender hedges hard to intercept Roy's path. And, in what is becoming a requisite skill for upper-echelon guards, Roy cuts back to split the double-team and penetrate into the heart of the Phoenix defence. Only in executing the crossover, he puts the ball between his legs from back to front so as to protect the ball and gain the decisive advantage. Breathtaking! Spectacular! Improvisational! And my words don't even come close to doing the move justice.

It dawned on me at that moment that I would really love to watch Brandon Roy play both the hardwood and streetball variants of pickup basketball in the summer. And for that matter (ignoring guys we already know are cool in the pickup game like Allen Iverson and Baron Davis), I would add to this list Nate Robinson, David Lee, Carlos Delfino, Caron Butler, Charlie Villanueva, Deron Williams, Brandon Bass, Juan Carlos Navarro, Tyson Chandler, Luke Walton, Matt Barnes, Ben Gordon, and Louis Williams.

I just have a feeling that each would be amazing to watch, that each would flourish in these games as well, though perhaps in the most unexpectedly cool and creative departures from their usual NBA-style performances. In effect it is saying that the lived environment constrains (body) language's conditions of creative possibility, and that watching these athletes in the other environments of basketball would be like listening to a trilingual poet spit verse.

After questioning the potential future corporatization of professional athlete DNA just the other day and likening it to equine insemination and breeding services, I tuned in to the Trail Blazers vs. Suns game last night and heard the Portland announcers refer to Phoenix PF Amare Stoudemire as "a horse." This type of discourse cannot help but permeate a network system:

"Amare Stoudemire" AND horse OR workhorse OR stud OR beast

Even with a few modest filters in that query, a Google search still returns over 43,000 results.

In sport sponsorship, there is almost always a contractual obligation between the athlete and sponsor in which the former bears the brand marks of the latter during most, if not all, public appearances or press conferences. To the best of my knowledge, there is no industry standard template regarding image rights, but rather specific provisions are contract dependent.

This had dramatic implications in 1992 when professional athletes were first allowed to compete in the Olympics. Reebok was the clothing sponsor for the entire U.S. Olympic team, which meant that any American athlete who won a medal would wear the official Reebok track suit on the medal podium. But the "Dream Team" of NBA basketball players was creaming everyone in sight and Michael Jordan (among others) let it be known that as a Nike endorser, he wouldn't wear the Reebok uniform on the podium and would instead skip the medal ceremony. For someone whose recognizability at the time rivaled that of the Pope, this was scandal. But eventually a compromise was reached in which the Nike athletes stood alongside their teammates on the medal podium with U.S. flags draped over their shoulders to cover the offending Reebok logo.

Clearly, the hotly-contested athlete image rights are key to the value of immaterial intellectual properties. For the visioning economy to extract this value, the (two-dimensional) surface of the athletic body must continually be photographed, while images of body volumes have assumed increased significance as well. But what about the interiors of athletic bodies and the flows that pass into, through, and out of them? Will they become subject to the vision machine? Though this control of the athlete is already happening to a degree in the context of anti-doping practices, we might wonder if such visioning will ultimately contribute directly to the pancapitalist profit motive?

As mentioned already, the extended skin of the athletic uniform is sponsored; the actual skin may become sponsored as well (tattoos representing gambling or casino web sites?); and professional sports teams have insured various athlete body parts to minimize investment risk. Now I am wondering about a related, but slightly different proposition: What if the intellectual property under consideration was DNA?

The NBA currently runs mandatory workshops for all rookie players in which they learn about various risk factors and occupational hazards, among them the "nefarious" women who use various methods to try and get impregnated during one-night stands in order to sue/extort for palimony at a later date. Now these women are ultimately doing it for the money, but what if instead of getting pregnant they were trying to save the ejaculate for copying or resale? Does the sperm of world-class athletes have immense revenue potential? If a black market grows for this type of service, how long before capital moves in to capture the rents?

Can't you see Nike, in the age of database-powered dating services and recombinant genetics, prospering in the insemination brokering service?

It's happened for years in the horse racing business.

What are the racial implications of the marketing and sale of high performance athlete DNA? ("If you want a white child, you may choose from these athletes; black athletes begin on page 5 of the catalogue. I'm afraid you can't have Michael Jordan's size and jumping ability with white skin — we don't have the technology to blanch DNA at this time.")

From there, what about the vat-grown eyeballs and assorted body organs suggested by Gibson in Neuromancer? What template are they built upon — perhaps snippets of an athlete from the Nike stable (in shades of hooks' "eating the Other")? Can the genetic qualities of Jordan's muscle fibres be synthesized with the antibody capabilities of one's own cells to create a new marketable class of personalized products (cf. CAE)?

Sponsorship just uses the arena or the billboard — or the surface of the athlete — as a vector for sign communication. As such, it is not very interesting in and of itself. A more interesting proposition is to ask what new vectors will transmit the sign, for it is the sign that is the source of power and wealth in the immaterial economy. DNA is one answer and must be examined in any critical futures analysis of the sportocracy.