One day, there will be a book written, a class taught or a documentary made about how, in the late 2010s, the nation became obsessed with the father of one teenage basketball player and was completely unable to quit him.
Many have said, and keep saying, LaVar Ball has to stop whatever he’s doing. They can’t stand it anymore.
Here’s an opposing view: LaVar should keep doing it.
How can you not want to see where this goes, how it plays out, how the story ends? Maybe somewhere along the way we’ll find out why we all kept running to him, giving him attention, giving him a platform, while screaming, “Shut up and go away and stop making us watch and listen to you!”
It all might end up with his son, Lonzo, a talented, potential-laden NBA prospect, becoming both a star and a multi-millionaire, the center of a conglomerate of his own making, a brand beholden to no company and no other mogul, his own product instead of one handcuffed to Phil Knight or Kevin Plank and their brands.
Or … it might end up with Lonzo becoming the biggest star to never shine off the court, because his father bit off more than he could chew and flew too close to the sun. Who thought he was a Bigger Baller than he actually was, in the one area that actually counted — not sound bites, ratings points or online clicks, but in the actual bank.
So, yes, it’s worth watching. But it’s not worth an overreaction.
It’s hard not to have an extreme opinion of LaVar or Lonzo or the two younger basketball-playing brothers coming along soon. But its easier than you think to look at what LaVar is trying to do — control something that has been reflexively handed over to companies like Nike and Under Armour for decades.
In the most blunt terms, to not auction off his son to the highest shoe-company bidder and have him make them richer.
It’s hard for many to see through the bluster to the common-sense, individualistic foundation Ball is laying down. Yet it’s as simple as the old Chris Rock joke: Shaq is rich, but the man that signs Shaq’s check is wealthy.
The check Lonzo Ball would have gotten from one of the big shoe companies would have been enormous. It also would have been someone else’s check.
Not everybody is satisfied with that, and not everybody is supposed to be.
