The Unbearable Envy of the Drafted Basketball Player
I’m a pickup basketball player drafted into a casual after-work league with a new season starting this week. I’ve been lucky with my teammates, but the lead-up is still terrible: nerves, anxiety, impossible hopes, a lot of fear. I joke with friends that I’m positivity Teflon: I don’t trust the people who think we can win; the haters feel affirming in some strange, sick way. I’ve been through this twice before but this one’s different, easier somehow, and not just because I’m older and more well adjusted. It’s because of LeBron James, a basketball player I’ve never spoken to.
LeBron is a small forward and apparel entrepreneur who has played twenty seasons to my ten. We’ve never met in person, but I’ve admired his work and clocked his success. His new season with the Lakers also starts this week. Some important context we’ll return to: The average number of games that Americans watched in 2021, based on a Gallup poll, was 13.
Basketball players, or at least most of us, are specific types of monsters. We have the hubris to think we have the ability to sink a ball, that someone might want us on a team. We also have an extra underlayer of shame for thinking this way. (At least I do.) Sometimes I hear from fans, and that’s always a thrill. But we have many fewer concrete markers of success than most professions. Sometimes we yearn for a clear sign that we’re making progress, that things are going well.
Part of how I’ve gotten through the pickup basketball season before is to make it a competition, to pick another player that’s playing at the same time as me and channel my frustration and hope and fear into watching that player succeed, watching them “beat” me. Blame capitalism, scarcity, two decades of competitive athletics, being the second of four children, but I find it difficult not to feel like I’ve failed somehow if I don’t “win.” The paradox of beating myself in order to feel like I’m winning is not lost on me.
The facts of basketball are often stark: Your friend who runs the pickup league emails to say a game is coming up. You check and check your email. You wake up at 2 a.m. and search yourself online. You are one of 572 basketball players the local pickup basketball subreddit recommends this year. One of 10 on another list for fall. My older sister’s reply the last time I asked her about basketball: “I just watch TikTok now.”
Most basketball players don’t succeed either in terms of wins or critical unanimity. Most players don’t earn a living wage from their playing. Tenure-track appointments (I teach high school gym) are rare as unicorns. But being a basketball player is not a sentence handed down, it’s a choice I’ve made. I love other basketball players and do not want to root against them (some of my closest friends, et cetera), but there’s a desperation inherent in the state of basketball that sometimes makes this difficult.
Everything in basketball is categories: pickup basketball! The WNBA! The NBA! This time, months before the season, I looked for whichever basketball player might function most explicitly to drown out whatever snippets of attention I might get. “Oh no,” I said out loud to no one. “I can’t beat LeBron James! I love LeBron James’ playing!” I emailed the leader of my pickup league: “He seems so lovely!” (I’ve never met LeBron but had started following him on Instagram.) I am not physically capable of hating him!
I began to keep track of LeBron’s placement on the lists, the post-game analysis (a designation that connotes, well, only that a sportswriter enjoyed your game) and other good reviews. It felt exciting to see another player succeed. When I got emails about my own performance on the court, I began to look to make sure LeBron was mentioned too. Yay, Bron! (No idea if that’s his nickname.) I’d email back, ignoring whatever nice thing they’d said about my own game. “Bron must be so thrilled,” I’d say instead. He seems like a good dad too! I told my husband (my poor husband) one of those nights I couldn’t sleep and was scrolling through LeBron’s Instagram. Do you think he’d want to be my friend?
Often we were mentioned on the subreddit for local pickup basketball together, his picture right next to mine. A few times I was on a thread and he was not, and I felt sad. The one big thing I’d really wanted and did not get: a Bill Simmons interview. The day before I sent this essay off, in the car with my family, there was LeBron, talking to Bill. “He does sound really nice,” my husband said.
I felt better almost immediately. Significantly less awful. These small, good things could not feel good for me because none of them would be sufficient to confirm that I’ll feel safe and sure forever, that it was not patently absurd for me to keep playing basketball. For LeBron, I was able to see them as just a nice thing for a nice person; a small gift to be briefly, happily enjoyed.
I began to understand more clearly the ridiculousness of thinking about what basketball players or any athletes do as competition. Insofar as my pickup basketball season’s success or failure was contingent on so many arbitrary, unseen forces, none of it, of course, was LeBron’s fault. I imagined LeBron might also be made a little queasy by all these made-up-feeling wins and losses too.
And here too is the thing about any external markers of success or failure: I play for reasons that have nothing to do with them. That’s the beauty of it. But also, that’s what makes post-game analysis on Reddit, a prize listing, a repost on Instagram so impossible to hold onto.
The world has told us that they matter. They do matter! We have to live. I need enough “success” with each season of pickup basketball to secure another spot on the team next year. But also, nothing will ever be as powerful as whatever it is inside of us that got us playing to begin with, that keeps us playing, when everyone’s forgotten all those lists, when we’re broke and underemployed again.
Which is all to say: Watch me play basketball, but also, watch LeBron! Watch 16 (18?!) games of basketball this year instead of 13, but not none at all.
