Hard not to play favourites with DeRozan
It was the middle of Wednesday afternoon, in a quiet moment on a crazy day that is certain to lead to crazier weeks and months to come, that it hit me.
Why, I had wondered and had been asked, did the DeMar DeRozan trade to San Antonio hit such a nerve? What was behind the outpouring of respect and admiration for the young man, respect and admiration so universal that I can’t think of another situation with the Raptors quite like it?
And then it came: He was like us.
Not “us” in the old, non-athlete kind of way, but in a bigger “us” context. An “us” we could all aspire to and appreciate.
He is, as much as possible, normal. He isn’t egotistical or at all self-centred. He put team and others ahead of himself. I don’t remember a lot of “I” conversations or “me” conversations; it was generally “us” and “we” and the team. Admirable. I will fully admit to having a fondness for the young man that transcended an appreciation for his estimable basketball skills. Maybe it was because I dealt with him basically every day of his professional career here over nine years. I saw him grow from this shy teenager into a confident grown-up and it was impressive.
The Mighty Quinn (Raptors director of communications, and former Star colleague, Jennifer Quinn) and I were talking at one point late Wednesday and I told her: “We’re not really supposed to care. About him I do. I grew him up.”
That’s probably not the hard-hitting kind of journalism we should practise, but I make no bones about it. The kid was — and is — one of my favourites.
I liked that he talked to us about his feelings and his life, his kids and his dad’s health issues and, yeah, his battles with demons far too many people suffer with in silence. And the overwhelming sense I got from reading missives on social media and talking to friends and loved ones was that those were traits you appreciated, too.
Normalcy.
Far too often, the men and women we write about seem to be somehow larger than life; giants of athletics whose skills on courts and fields and rinks allow us to marvel at their skills but appear to be monoliths.
Not so, DeMar. Oh, don’t get me wrong. His basketball skills are amazing, I don’t know that fans here really had an appreciation for how good he was because we saw him every single night. He is a great, great basketball player. Flaws in his game? Sure, they exist, but trust me, over the course of time we’re going to remember how good he was, not what he couldn’t do.
But no. It was his normalcy that I think hit a nerve with the people. I know it did with me. He truly enjoyed being sort of from Toronto: by representing the Raptors, by being someone a country could be proud of and embrace.
All those times he said he wanted to play his entire career here he was absolutely speaking from the heart. It was not lip service, trust me on that. He desperately wanted to be the guy who played 15, 17, 20 years here and made an indelible mark on Toronto and Canadian basketball history.
Trust me, he was hurt Wednesday and sad. And I think that’s even more endearing.
I don’t know that I can come up with a top five moments on the court of his nine years. There were so many moments that all kind of meld together.
I will tell you what I’m going to remember most, though, away from the game.
I’ll remember the afternoon we stood in a back corner of the practice facility and he was opening up about his fight with depression and what it was like to fight that fight. He knew it was a bit of bombshell and so did I, but he also was human and normal enough to know he needed to talk about it.
The day after, or maybe it was a couple of days after, when the story was out there and it was blowing up, he was doing his usual post-game scrum in front of his locker. I was standing off to the side near the door to the inner sanctum, not really working but being there because of what I’d written. If he was going to be pissed, or if it spun totally out of control in a bad way, I wanted him to see me so he could say what he wanted to say:
“Dougie? You the man. You the bleeping man.” That was his comment as he strode by me, delivered with a smile and outside of earshot of the crowd.
I remember getting unsolicited texts, or quick replies to ones I sent from a hospital bed at Toronto General during the playoffs, that ranged from “man, you gotta get better and get back, miss you” to “yeah, Dougie, we got this, tell ’em not to worry.”
Normal stuff. Good stuff. DeMar stuff. And I’m gonna miss it. We can debate the basketball merits of Wednesday’s transaction until we’re blue in the face — I think it was a very good trade for the Raptors, regardless of what happens at the end of the coming season — but we cannot debate the fact that professional sports is a cut-throat business — where sentimentality gets you nothing, where loyalty may be given but is not always received.
DeMar wanted to be a Raptor forever, Masai Ujiri saw that differently and did what he thought best. I happen to think the first way to handle things is better than the second, but I know enough to realize that’s not how the world works.
I said this when coach Dwane Casey got fired, and I’ll say it again:
Sports can be wonderful. Sports can be painful. Bad things sometimes have to happen to good people, and that’s the crappy part of pro sports reality. The thing we need to do is hang on to the memories of the good times forever. They’re the ones that are worth it.