Tonight, the Phoenix Suns will face the favored Los Angeles Lakers in Game 2 of the Western Conference Playoffs. Naturally, the sports media is concentrating on the major matchups – Jason Richardson vs. Kobe, Nash vs. Fish, and Amare Stoudemire vs. Pau Gas…wait. Of course they’re not. Why should blogs like the Big Lead and AOL fanhouse and media outlets like CBS and ESPN.com cover basketball when there are tangentially related relatives to torment?

In case you wondering, Carrie Stoudemire isn’t a transvestite Damon Stoudamire, or a gender confused Salim Stoudamire. She won’t be on the bench of either team. She even hasn’t and likely won’t play in the WNBA. What she did do, more than twenty years ago, was give birth to Amare. Beyond this, she isn’t newsworthy in the least. Of course, all these sites link to the ESPN source article that details a history of substance abuse, crime, and even prostitution? My grandfather was a drunk and a cocaine addict – where is his ESPN feature?

My grandfather, of course, was only the parent of a few doctors and a patent attorney, and the grandfather of a sporadically-read blogger. Until the appetite for blogger gossip ramps up, he’s likely in the clear. Somehow, being a relative of a public figure in today’s world makes you a public figure -Dez Bryant’s mother has been a topic of conversation for similar reasons. Carrie Stoudemire, plainly, is not a public figure, and deserves to undergo her problems and solutions away from media glare.

Carrie, however, isn’t the only victim in the case of course. Amare is a man who lost his father at the age of twelve, grew up in a poor, drug-infested neighborhood, saw his brother thrown in prison, lost a college scholarship, bounced through six high-schools in five years, and lost his scholarship to Memphis because a Nike representative gave his mother $100 for cigarattes while in prison, earning Stoudemire the dreaded “character concern” label, and sinking his draft position arguably eight spots in the process. Despite this, Stoudemire is one of the NBA’s finest power forwards, has not had an instance of poor behavior, has been honored by the NBA for his charity work, and helps build water-wells in Sierra Leone in his spare time. In other words – despite every time his family, corporations trying to put their hands in his pocket, and life in general have conspired to ruin his life, they have failed.

The congratulations Stoudemire gets, of course, is to have the story of his mother, of whom he is by accounts very protective, placed on the front page of ESPN.com the morning of one of the most important games in his life. This dog has been chasing him for his entire life, and the sports media has let it in to piss on his rug. Is this really the way it’s supposed to work?

Deadspin popularized sports gossip, but used to at least keep it to, you know, sports figures. Then they expanded and became a gossip site devoted to soft-core porn and ESPN gossip. The college blogosphere is full of apocryphal stories of odd living arrangements, bizarre parents, and other such nonsense. How’s this for a change: TALK ABOUT THE ATHLETES. Here’s hoping that the next site willing to publicize the tangential struggles of a “civilian” is willing to stand gossip about members of their own family. We eagerly await the Big Lead to dish about his slut of an Aunt.