The tribal reaction to Durant’s downfall
The thing people forget about pro athletes, with the pageantry and celebrity and drama, is that they’re people. It’s like Seinfeld said once. People: They’re the worst.
They’re the best, too, which is what makes the joke. That’s what happened in Game 5 of the NBA Finals on Monday in Toronto. The Raptors could have won a title, but made enough mistakes to blow the game. The Warriors, champions that they are, refused to be buried. And because Kevin Durant came back from a calf injury and tried to play, and then suffered an Achilles injury as some Toronto fans reacted with glee, the game itself felt strangely like a sideshow. It was an awful night.
“Sports is people,” said a tearful Warriors general manager Bob Myers. “I know Kevin takes a lot of hits sometimes, but he just wants to play basketball and right now he can’t.”
Initially, a lot of Raptors fans were cheering for the apparent steal. It might not have been clear Durant was seriously hurt; he limped for a second and sat on the floor. His face didn’t show evident distress. One NBA official said he initially thought he might have lost a shoe.
But in the TV shot, you can see several Raptors fans waving goodbye to Durant, grins on their faces. That’s a human reaction, too: a tribal, vicious one. Similarly, the significant cheer that erupted when Durant took his first limping step — you could see several Warriors players react angrily to that, and Raptors, too — was clearly about the prospect of this terrific player being hurt, which would push their own team closer to a championship.
It’s not defending the fans to say there were Raptors fans who reacted appropriately: as Kyle Lowry, Danny Green and Serge Ibaka tried to quiet the crowd, you could see hundreds doing the same. Once cued that this wasn’t something to be cheered, the reaction changed to respectful applause. There was a brief “KD!” chant as he entered the tunnel.
But some took delight in the injury, in the building and at viewing parties outside the arena. The emotions of the moment were skittering; Raptors fans are celebrated for their passion, for the depth of their feelings. They were cheering for their team.
It just happened to be at the expense of another human, and that’s the cold, hard lack of humanity that tribes can create. Taken to its logical extreme,
“We’re only idolized as superstar athletes, not human beings.” DeMarcus Cousins, Warriors centre
sports explain how modern politics works, at the moment.
“Trash. So trash,” said Golden State centre DeMarcus Cousins, who suffered an Achilles injury last year and blew his quadriceps in the first round. “We’re only idolized as superstar athletes, not human beings. It’s always about what we can do between those lines. That’s it.”
They’re people in there: under the rumours, the reporting. Kawhi Leonard is seen as a robot, but has been driven and shaped his whole life by the unsolved murder of his father, and basketball means so much to him. We all carry something, all of us.
And so do the legends, the cartoon heroes and villains in sports. Durant is famously sensitive: Twitter burner accounts, Instagram reading, a man whose talent is galactic and who is still trying to outrun insecurities that came from his childhood, being called soft from the time he was an impossibly skinny child, a cupcake, a weakling who’s leaving anyway, probably, maybe.
Durant might have blown his Achilles in an effort not just to help his teammates, but to prove a lifetime of critics — whose opinions shouldn’t matter to him, but clearly do — wrong.