Feel how you will about LeBron during the NBA season. Curse him and maybe revel a little in the unsure future his team is facing, because it’s probably good for your team, directly or not. It’s sport. It’s competitive and within the parameters of fandom, where the spectrum runs from casual to rabid, to root against people, to let yourself be illogical. But once the season stops, or the personalities—like LeBron—step off the court and slip back into the real world they inhabit alongside the rest of us, you have an important job: don’t be dumb.
Don’t be dumb about your expectations of players. Frankly, it’s dumb to have expectations of players. You don’t know them, why do you expect anything of them? Maybe you expect them not to walk, to get traded, you expect that they owe you something and they can’t instead choose what’s best for their career, their families, like you would. Don’t do that, it’s dumb. Don’t hold to the antiquated expectations that people, that athletes, are not allowed to engage with or show an interest in the thing that you know them best for already. Did you once pick up a new hobby, maybe? Become a bit more engaged in the current political climate? Decide you were going to start ordering cappuccinos instead of drip coffee for a change? Did anyone give you shit for it? Probably not, because that would be dumb.
And when I say dumb I mean it in the purest sense. I mean it as the muting of your cognitive process, of forgoing tuning into your intelligence for just a second because it feels full of effort. It’s great to be dumb at home I guess, that sense of blankness that comes over your mind when Netflix asks if you’re still watching something you forgot was on in the first place. Sometimes you have to let your brain slump up against its own walls, take a breather. That’s fine. That’s dumb on your own time. But when you enter the world, even if you physically don’t step out into it and just open Twitter, Facebook, you have the obligation to quit it.
What Fox News’ Laura Ingraham said about LeBron James’ participation in a run-of-the-mill political conversation that took place during a segment of Cari Champion’s, ‘Rolling With The Champion’, was unequivocally dumb, extremely so. It was another kind of dumb, too—dangerous dumb. Not to herself, she’s a lost cause who hardly deserves a response and I feel angry at myself for giving her even this small subsection of space. Her statement, all barely two minutes of it, is ignorance wielded so confidently and rooted in zero fact that it works like a two-way mirror into the heart of what her fumbling excuse for an argument is a prop for—racism. It expands quickly, what she’s saying, into fully realized representation and in this embodiment proceeds to make room, to carve space, for this stunted style of thinking, or rather not thinking, to take root and grow. If ignorance plants the seed than it is her smugness that waters it. Her face, already sated when she asks, “Must they run their mouths like that?” eyes lazy and lizard-like, this reptilian reaction of the brain to just reject in fear what she disagrees with, or has no comparison points to understand, because it might take energy to instead ask herself what it is about a casual conversation between two black men and a black woman that makes her so mad.
I mean duh, she’s a bigot. And yeah, Fox News. But the line of thinking that got Ingraham to a point in her thought process to believe she was doing her due diligence in silencing someone like LeBron James is the more dangerous dumbness I’m getting at. You could argue that with the rise of Trump and white nationalism with it, opinions like this are now out in the open like worms gorged on rainwater, making it easier to identify the racists and troglodytes for what they are. That’s true, sure, but it’s also made it acceptable for someone like Ingraham to hold a nationally syndicated platform and spew dangerous rhetoric like she were reading a weather report. The irony of her implication that listening to Kevin Durant or LeBron James is not just unwise, but to her, is dangerous, and that they are too uneducated to hold a relevant opinion over a closed-circuit show in comparison to Ingraham’s essentially state-sponsored propaganda platform, fills my chest with such fury and heat that my skin starts to burn, my blood rising to it so fast that my fight or flight response kicks in. Not to mention her skipping over Steve Kerr and Gregg Popovich’s very frank and frequent comments on Trump and the country, entirely.
There’s an easy way to combat this kind of danger, and she’s made it a cakewalk in this case by going after the most well-liked and regarded man in professional sports. LeBron James is a genius. He’s a genius of the game, his basketball and business IQ is unparalleled, a Beautiful Mind type of off-the-charts. He has excelled at everything he’s done in his life, on and off the court, and has the emotional, financial, and academic intelligence to match. He has all this because he has to. James was raised poor by a single mother and made his own way, completely. More than that, as a black man in America—and now Trump’s America—he has to be good, better, at everything, he cannot in any way be average and hope to be taken as seriously as lackwits like Ingraham. This is a man who year after year is in the prime of his life, he doesn’t slow. Not on the court and certainly not off of it. Basically LeBron James is the dumbest target imaginable and you’d have to be a complete moron to do it, the kind of moron who still thinks “stick to sports” is a relevant mantra.
Stick to sports is over, it’s done, if it ever even existed at all. As a line it’s an excuse for dumb people to refuse to engage with something they feel threatened by, or simply do not have the depth of character and brainpower to try. Nobody tells firefighters to stick to fires when they talk about dangers in underfunded infrastructure, or fisherman to stick to fish when they talk about how their economy is in collapse. Sports are now, more than ever, a reflection of what’s going on in the wider world. People love them because they allow for triumph, rivalry, and release on a controlled, easy to access scale. None of that goes away if players engage with the outside world and the NBA has long been a league that supports the individuality and voices of its players, it’s one of the reasons why it is so great, so dramatic, and so fundamentally human and good. Be illogical as a fan, go nuts, you have a job to do, but don’t be dumb.
