Rick Carlisle is miffed. Stan Van Gundy is threatening retaliatory measures. And Steve Kerr, basketball coach and unusually perceptive human being, sees it all in his usual sharp focus.
The subject is LaVar Ball, celebrity basketball dad and shrewd in the ways of America in 2018, where being famous for being famous has replaced true accomplishment as the metric for success. And how ESPN, alleged news organization, has bought into that by breathlessly hanging on every word that comes from the mouth of a former college hoops benchwarmer who happened to get lucky in the progeny department.
The benchwarmer made "news" again recently when he tore into Lakers coach Luke Walton, who coaches the benchwarmer's oldest son, Lonzo. LaVar Ball said Walton had lost the team. He said he didn't know how to utilize his son's talents. He said ...
Well. He said pretty much the same things he's said about every coach his sons have ever had who wasn't, you know, him.
Of course, we know this because ESPN (and to be fair, other news outlets) put it out there as if it mattered. Which is why Carlisle, another NBA coach, is miffed at the Worldwide Leader. And why Van Gundy, president of the Detroit Pistons, has threatened to deny ESPN access to his club. And why Kerr, the NBA champions' coach, noted the other day that you can't blame ESPN, that this is just who we are now.
Basketball Dads from Hell, though common as dirt, get taken seriously. A game-show host and famous-for-being-famous rich guy gets elected president. Mere celebrity becomes an end in itself, rendering actual achievement irrelevant. Remember when you had to have qualifications to be President of the United States? My, how charmingly quaint that all was.
Or as Kerr put it, vis-à-vis LaVar Ball: "Where we’re going is we’re going away from covering the game, and we’re going toward just sensationalized news. It’s not even news, really. It’s just complete nonsense. But if you package that irrational nonsense with glitter and some ribbon, people are going to watch.
“So, I talked to people in the media this year. I said, ‘Why do you guys have to cover that guy?’ And they say, ‘Well, we don’t want to, but our bosses tell us we have to because of the ratings, because of the readership.’ Somewhere, I guess in Lithuania, LaVar Ball is laughing. People are eating out of his hands for no apparent reason, other than that he’s become the Kardashian of the NBA or something.”
Exactly. People are eating out of his hand -- people who should know better, and probably do -- and, in Lithuania, LaVar Ball is laughing. He's laughing because he understands what America's about these days better than you do. He's laughing because, although he had no game himself, his children do -- and he's smart enough to know what that means.
What that means is the usual rules don't apply, and so you can go your own way if you've got the nuggets to do it. You can skip the one-and-done college racket and create one of your own. You can launch a shoe line that's flying off the shelves even though it just got an F rating from the Better Business Bureau.
You can, because your sons have game, become a larger-than-life figure simply by opening your mouth and saying outrageous stuff. That's because, in a media universe where lunatics like Alex Jones are taken quasi-seriously because the lunatic in the White House takes him seriously, all it takes to bring ESPN running is for some Hoops Dad From Hell to say he could have taken Michael Jordan one-on-one, or that Luke Walton is a terrible coach.
When he does, Stephen A. Smith splutters. Rick Carlisle and Stan Van Gundy find themselves talking indignantly about LaVar Ball. And LaVar Ball laughs all the way to the bank, because publicity is publicity, and all the indignation and spluttering have done is put up another billboard for LaVar's shoe company.
He may have had no game, see. But he knows this one.
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