What is it about sports that makes people succumb to rank sentimentality? Modes of existing that would irritate any person you met in real life—total devotion to your employer, a perfect and abiding love of the place where you live, a single-minded obsession with your profession—are, the second they’re placed in a sports context, transmuted into the features of a winner, of a purely loyal man, of the bringer of truth to this dark world. Every sports hero is made Campbellian: a hero on a journey, devoted to a single noble cause.
There are exactly zero other forms of storytelling, outside of writing and talking about sports, where this is entertaining. Sure, on paper Luke Skywalker is the hero of Star Wars, but everyone reading this knows who they really love. They love Han Solo. A rogue. A scoundrel. A clear-eyed pillar of realistic thinking; an understanding of human nature that is maybe a little cynical. But the second anyone puts on a damn uniform, they are expected to lose their humanity and become a Tool for the Squad.
Kevin Durant has asked for a trade away from the Brooklyn Nets. Why? Because, reader, the organization and team are a walking dead end. He came to play with Kyrie Irving, an excellent guard who has been lifted to legend status in the eyes of NBA players for reasons I have never quite understood. When Irving, a public eccentric, opted out of vaccination and was forced to sit for many of the team’s games by decree of New York State’s COVID-prevention restrictions, the team jettisoned their role players to acquire the services of all-time NBA antihero James Harden. This did not work, and he was soon jettisoned for Ben Simmons, an even bigger enigma. In these various pursuits, the team has been left with no depth, no decent young players, no draft picks, and no hope for immediate or long-term success outside of the skill of Durant and Irving themselves.
The popular sporting imagination has created a narrative: that if he were a Big Strong Man, Durant would simply stay and will this motley crew to true victory through the twin power of skill and leadership. This is absolute bullshit. As a Trail Blazers partisan, I have watched Damian Lillard, by all accounts a tremendous leader and a player whose creative force always seeks to impose his will on the game first and foremost, swim and die with a series of shittier and shittier rosters, constructed by the team’s wack, silver-haired ex-GM Neil Olshey. If I am being clear-headed, Lillard would have found more success if he made some threats, engineered a trade, did something aside from looking around at his subpar, mismatched teammates, shrugged his shoulders, and drove to the basket 20 times a game.
Suffering in stoic silence for the sake of honor is a sucker’s game. LeBron knew it: It’s why he left the Cavs for the Heat after dragging their bloated rosters to the Finals over and over. Durant also learned it the hard way: The Oklahoma City Thunder were once a scrappy team of nice boys, beloved by all, but the twin agents of managerial malfeasance—trading James Harden right before he became a perennial MVP candidate and the overwhelming mediocrity that blossoms in whatever soil you plant Russell Westbrook in—made it a quagmire. And so, seeking… validation, or whatever, Durant left for Golden State, a well-managed team that could pay him his money and that was all but guaranteed to win the title with his services. And he did. Twice.
If the Honor Crowd had their way, Durant would have kept getting shoved in the second round while Westbrook clanked 15 footers off the back iron while mean-mugging animal mascots forever. What they didn’t realize was this: Kevin Durant wasn’t “The Servant” anymore. He was a man now. And you know what men need to be, in this world? They need to be Yojimbo.
If you are not familiar with Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece, Yojimbo tells the story of a wandering ronin, a masterless samurai, who drifts into a town ruled by two warring clans, played at maximum dirtbag swagger by the king of all actors, Toshiro Mifune. The leaders of these clans are cruel morons who are fighting over very little and causing a monument of suffering in their wake. Their underlings are goons whose common sense is replaced by their devotion to this idiotic cause.
The ronin, who says only that his name is “30-Year-Old Mulberry Field,” teams up with a local restaurateur and proceeds to goad them into an out and out war by selling his services to both of the clans, back and forth, for larger and larger sacks of cash. He also engineers some weird lies, frees people from prisons, and just does whatever he can to spread mistrust and chaos so both clans will burn themselves out and leave the town in peace.
Spoiler alert: It works. Mulberry Field engineers a big, dumb war, they weaken each other to the point of breakability, he finishes off the remaining big bads in a wild duel. He does good and makes a small pile of cash, all by discarding the idea of “samurai honor” or “chivalry” or whatever. By simply seeing this situation as it is, exploiting it, and then getting the heck outta Dodge.
A sports fan would say, hey, c’mon… he didn’t do that the right way. All this scheming and subterfuge! He should have just picked one of these awful sides and rode it out to victory, like a true warrior. But that story would suck, and that mindset is barren and uninteresting.
What Durant and some of his other contemporary superstars have done is looked at these messy teams that they play for, with their rich, cheapskate owners and incompetent front offices, and said: I don’t actually need to put up with this bullshit. Just because I have wandered into this town doesn’t mean I need to play by their rules, or the rules of the old men braying on First Take, or the hooting masses tweeting at me on the internet.
Once, not long ago, Durant was unusually concerned with what people thought about him: getting in internet fights, trying to triangulate his movements to acquire respect, acting like he enjoyed the company of the people of Oklahoma City. But once he won titles in Oakland and didn’t get the dap he deserved from the farting masses, and tearing his Achilles trying to gut out one more title, I think he realized something: That’s all a bunch of crap and he should just do whatever he wants.
So, he went to the Nets, to play in a big city, with Kyrie. When that situation curdled on account of literally everyone but him (he was awesome in Brooklyn), he said, man, fuck that trade me. Loyalty in this game isn’t real and isn’t necessary. Durant, and LeBron, and Chris Paul, and Ben Simmons, and James Harden, and every other athlete who can call his own shots are in a profession that has a fast-approaching expiration date. “Loyalty” is nothing when you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel as your vitality seeps out of your body.
The only cohort of people this garbage really honors and supports is sports team owners (see above as Jeanie Buss probably subtweets LeBron). LeBron, for those who don’t know, deigned to come to the Lakers a few years back, even though they are a second-rate organization run by Kobe Bryant’s old agent, for some reason. He managed to use his connections to flush out their unpromising young core, replace them with Anthony Davis and other, better players, and win them a title.
But then, incompetence and malaise set in. Davis got injured, the team traded for Westbrook for some reason, they fell out of the playoffs, and LeBron got pissed off again. Even though he brought them a title that they, organizationally, did not deserve, Buss and the other purple-and-gold cultists began kicking their little footsies around in the dirt, whining about LeBron, and, ultimately, trying to set their fanbase against him by comparing him to Kobe, the player they actually like.
Like John McCain before him, Kobe has, in death, become a convenient avatar for criticizing whatever someone doesn’t like about The Modern Basketball Player. Because he is not currently alive to shill for crypto (he absolutely would, no question), appear on Joe Rogan, and embarrass himself with a series of ghostwritten YA novels, he is now an angel who never did anything selfish while he was on the Lakers.
Kevin Durant #7 of the Brooklyn Nets dunks the ball during the game against the Golden State Warriors on December 22, 2020, at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York.
Nathaniel S. Butler/GettyThis is, of course, nonsense. Just like McCain, who toed the line for all of the most hideous crap the GOP concocted during his time as a particularly corrupt U.S. Senator, Kobe was, in life, the whiniest NBA player of his generation. He forced Shaq out of town because he was jealous, openly whined about his teammates, shit on guys when they left, dumped on Pau Gasol (who single-handedly saved the back hand of his miserable career), all under the pretense of “psychological mastery,” but really just because he wanted to seem cool. He was also an inveterate ball hog who took awful shots and was lazy on defense, but… I’m only talking about the civic reasons he was toxic and miserable, here.
Anyway, the thing about all this backbiting and whining is this: It worked. Kobe, a mean weirdo who was maybe the fifth or so best player of his generation, got to win five rings and retire as the NBA’s second all-time scorer, all because he wielded his popularity like a knife and made the organization support him year after year. There was no loyalty to that shit! What the hell is Jeanie Buss even talking about? Not any real Kobe, that’s for sure. She’s instead talking about a fake, honorable Kobe—an avatar of honor, a player who serves the team and the fans and not himself. But, really, why should they? Why does Durant need to give up years of his life to people who are mishandling his gifts? Discard honor, I say, and let the billionaires who control your NBA destiny fight for your services. They deserve his disdain. I celebrate Kevin Durant’s cynicism, his late-career Yojimbo turn. Would that we all could see the vicious cycle of wealth for the no-sum death game it really is.
