The sun still rose this morning. The apocalypse is not among us simply because a team won a basketball game last night.
In the immediate moments after the conclusion of the NBA season, I was among the chorus of people who were happier the cocky bunch wearing the white jerseys lost as opposed to the maligned bunch in blue won.
As the night wore on, I realized holding up a bunch of young men for such praise or ridicule was silly. At the end of the day most athletes are simply men—and occasionally women—in their 20s who are playing the game they love and getting paid for it.
Athletes, politicians, actors and other so-called celebrities are, and always will be people. Because a person has more money or is recognized faster than most of us does not make them immune from hurting.
Then I heard the combination of anguish, frustration and surprise from a 26-year hold multimillionaire who had the gall to lose last night. It made me rethink a few things.
"At the end of the day, all the people that were rooting on me to fail, at the end of the day, they have to wake up tomorrow and have the same life that they had before they woke up today. They have the same personal problems they had today. …” That is what LeBron James said about an hour after his dream of winning an NBA championship was suspended for yet another year.
It has baffled me why we as people love to bring public figures to such depths when they do not meet either their expectations or ours. Our collective envy seemingly prohibits us from having empathy at just the moment someone else needs it.
Social media has ruined the line between constructive criticism and vindictiveness. Combined with my generation being dubbed the most narcissistic in American history one can see how that is a Molotov cocktail when intertwined with the wrong person’s vocabulary.
The point is most of what we know about athletes is when they are at work. I am sure we all have a few colleagues who we think we know. However, if we saw them at a BDSM convention, or if they were a deacon in their church, or if we saw them at a gay bar we would be stunned.
Why should it be any different with athletes, who are like most of us—except their salaries are bigger and more people want to sleep with them? Winning an NBA championship does not instantly make a basketball player, or person, better or more complete. It just makes someone the best in their profession.
And if you can’t support someone’s aspirations to be the best in their chosen line of work, especially when it does not pertain to you, then perhaps James had a point.
“...I'm going to continue to live the way I want to live and continue to do the things that I want to do with me and my family and be happy with that. So they can get a few days or a few months or whatever the case may be on being happy about not only myself, but the Miami Heat not accomplishing their goal. But they got to get back to the real world at some point."
Laughs and liveliness,
-Wb
