by Valerie Morales
Kyrie Irving was two months old when the city I lived in burned. For babies like Kyrie, born the year of the Rodney King riots, it felt like a bleak and depressing future. In 1992 not much had changed from the deadly fifties and sixties, nothing had been transformed, racial reconciliation was a theory more than a promise. As time moved through the Bush and Trump presidencies, there lacked a tangible commitment to racial healing policy in the aftermath of terrible and numbing catastrophes. It felt like the riots accomplished nothing. Anthony Baez was dead. Amadou Diallo was dead. Ousmane Zongo was dead. Kathryn Johnston was dead. Sean Bell was dead. Oscar Grant was dead. Breonna Taylor was dead. Tamir Rice was dead.
Unimaginable in 1992 was what the future would hold for acolytes of the American dream. The kind of privilege most black men couldn’t dream of owning for it was too far fetched to put into words was bestowed upon the talented tenth of athletes and it is the kind of privilege Kyrie Irving takes for granted. But it’s ironic too. At any moment Irving can be pulled over in a police stop. Searched. Cuffed. Humiliated. Maybe beaten, maybe shot. But on the other hand, Kyrie has the freedom to live the melodrama of an anti-hero where its easy to ignore the deaths of 140,000 black men, women and children ruined by Covid. To be self-aggrandizing one day and then the next day post on his Instagram beautifully rendered black art is the unorthodox world Irving has created for himself.
Kyrie Irving is always turning, it seems, away from the sun. There is his quintessential talent that highlights his craft. And there are his fiery comments about the flat Earth or vaccines or media or teammates. Strategically, firestorms don’t bother Irving even when he is put in the position of justifying his behavior to a skeptical media and public who understand that basketball has nothing in common with suffering. Nevertheless, Irving covets a crusade.
He doesn’t seem too concerned with empathy as his transactional lines attest. He may have been just as concerned with those who died of Covid than those who lost their jobs because of vaccination policy but you wouldn’t know it by his Trumpian anti-vaxxer oeuvre. He was a walking promotion for every anti-science conspiracy theory ever thought up in someone’s basement but there was more to it than that. Explosive talent only goes so far when you make your living playing a game. Because what all fans crave is for someone to do what they themselves cannot and be who they were never allowed to become and are scintillating at their job in the most tense moments while at the same time are likeable, are happy, love winning, work harder than is humanly possible, want to be in the hustle, and won’t cheat the game. It’s hard to understand the motivations of Irving because he doesn’t commit to work and by his own admission professional basketball isn’t the alpha and omega of his existence. Except he’s getting paid like it is.
Kyrie Irving did something this playoff season I never thought he’d ever have the power to do. He turned Lakers fans into Celtic fans. My neighbor Jon, fathered by a Magic Johnson loving daddy, has a purple and gold origin story. But when Brooklyn played the C’s Jon was repping the leprechaun and for one reason only. Kyrie. It had nothing to do with Irving’s hackneyed rants about the media. It had nothing to with the flat earth comment or his eff Thanksgiving churlishness. It had everything to do with his unwillingness to get vaccinated when black people are out here dying every day of a preventable disease. Jon can’t forgive solipsistic selfishness owned by the black privileged as if they live in the world all alone. As if Medgar Evers didn’t die so Kyrie could be free. As if Fannie Lou Hamer wasn’t beaten so badly in a Mississippi jail and sexually assaulted so Kyrie could then wax poetic about his independent self that is sinking black lives. As if Emmett Till didn’t have cotton gin fans tied around his ankles in the Tallahatchie River so Kyrie could one day be the kind of person who didn’t give a damn.
He has more titles that Chris Paul but no one thinks of Kyrie as a better player. He’s a better shooter, yes. A gifted athlete, yes. He can turn winning into losing in a matter of minutes and is a walking highlight reel but he lacks the know how of true leadership. The arc of we over me. Or, what’s best for the team is what’s best for me. It’s not a Kyrie kind of theology. And yet, considering how reality television incentivizes the self-absorbed ego, Kyrie is captivating for everything he is not.
His latest meltdown post-elimination was probably impulsive, wanting the last word because he can’t play another game, can’t change the narrative of Marcus Smart owning him. Kyrie looked tentative, awkward and an impressionistic artist. But the Nets needed him to dig in and sculpt a similar kind of Selma Burke masterpiece as “Woman Holding Sheaf of Wheat.”
Intensely melancholic, Irving did the temper tantrum thing where he flings all these pejoratives at those who make him uncomfortable. He called the media puppets and said journalists live in a Fantasyland when in reality it is Kyrie who works six months a year, is overly compensated, can decide not to go to work, and never misses a check. Irving is the 1% trying to be the 99%. It’s absurd that Kyrie wants membership in a club he no longer is a member of. To curry favor, he anti-vaxxes as if his own people have not died of Covid in excessive numbers.
The rage of those who don’t control their financial future have an ally in Kyrie. You know who I mean. Those who don’t get paid if they don’t go to work. But let me ask. Have you noticed that it is the folk who are invisible and not resourced, who live in over-policed drugged out neighborhoods with liquor stores on every corner who love it whenever Kyrie goes rogue, interpreting it as speaking truth to power.
The rest of us see through his facade particularly those of us who are raising children. He’s playing a character and yet we never see his character. Look, Kyrie isn’t the first athlete with varied interests- Kareem Abdul Jabbar comes to mind- nor is he the first player who wants to be seen as more than an athlete or someone who has comic pain. Basketball may be too small for Kyrie, too confining, too much of a box, and yet basketball is why he has relevance. Problematically for him though on a macro level Kyrie can’t seem to stand the concept of free speech. He’s in the wrong profession to reinvent himself so spectacularly.
For example, Magic Johnson was called “Tragic” after his massive mistakes at the 1984 NBA Finals and Jordan was frequently called a ball hog and they said Shaq wouldn’t win one ring much less four. Kobe was selfish and maniacal and a bad teammate, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was aloof and distant, Isaiah Rider had a screw loose.
Sports, if it is anything at all- and I don’t mean to conflate it with cops beating the shit out of Rodney King- sports is about achievement under stress. You fail when you lose. You overanalyze when you win. Everything in the middle is a lesson in humility or egocentricity.
Kyrie Irving has the kind of privilege that 99% of Americans will never own. He refuses vaccination and still has a job. He can choose when to work and still get paid. He can work six months a year or less and nothing about his life will be different. He can berate and bully journalists for doing their job after they criticize him for doing his. He can be brilliant in Game 1 against Boston, be average the rest of the way, and then blame the media for living in Fantasyland instead of admitting his anti-vaxx vacay cost the Nets a shot at the title.
Kyrie can be relatable but most of the time he messes it up with mistakes. He calls names and he doesn’t go to work and he spews rage when he’s privileged, instead of being grateful that he has amassed so much more. He’s angry and that wasn’t always the case, not for young Kyrie, not for the baby born the year Rodney King’s tormentors didn’t go to the slam. He’s in the conversation of most enigmatic and most enthralling. He’s a puzzle and then he’s not.
So much has been given to Kyrie and that is what irks the most, that he doesn’t honor “To whom much is given, much will be required (Luke 12:48).” The rage he foments at the media could have and should have been placed directly on the court and against the Boston Celtics, or to those dying of Covid, or towards the unhoused sleeping it seems everywhere, or to the victims of a relentless wave of crime. Sometimes it’s as if he’s forgotten what’s important. We. Not me.
I miss the younger Kyrie, the one with angst, the one who nearly bet Kobe Bryant 50 grand that he could beat him in a game of one-on-one, the player he was before LeBron returned to Cleveland. He was so hopeful then, so young, rarely purging his unique kind of vomit. To watch him was joy. He rarely smiles anymore, even when he’s brilliant as if inside his body resides an old man because this is what the league has done to him. Watered down the charisma. Turned an insider into an outsider.
