LaVar Ball might be annoying, but he isn’t new.
Papa Bear of the “Big Baller Brand” isn’t that different from the pageant style sports parents that we’ve seen for generations.
The “super parent” in professional sports has been around for some time. See Richard Williams, Earl Woods, Archie Manning, Carl Lindros, Tony Rasmus and Stefano Capriati before him. The only tangible difference is this is the first of its kind in the braggadocious sport of basketball. The cultural differences of the sport and current media landscape provide the perfect storm for Ball to speak in the first person before speaking about his first-born son.
Basketball is a sport sold off of ego and being eccentric. To be appreciated, it is not good enough just to be a baller you have to differentiate and become a personal brand.
That can be executed through clothing, self-congratulating and beefing with others. LaVar has used all three.
The open beefing is new from a parent but not new to b-ball. Player rivalry is to basketball what battle rap is to hip-hop. Feuds between the Michael Jordan and Isiah Thomas, Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal, Bryant and Dwight Howard, and Shaq and Howard added intrigue to the proceedings. This year’s must-watch soap opera has been Kevin Durant versus Russell Westbrook and the millennial Golden State Warriors against the old school players of yesteryear who if you let them tell it never shot three-pointers or took rest.
LaVar is just the latest incarnation of the tabloidization of the NBA. We just haven’t heard it from a parent, the microphone has always been in the hands of a player. He’s no more hands on than Richard Williams or Earl Woods, they just did their bidding in a sport that culturally was more docile and subservient. Saying you could beat Arnold Palmer in your prime wouldn’t exactly play at the country club. In a basketball gym it gets you on ESPN. Lavar has instigated fights with the sports apparel industry, Stephen Curry, Jordan, Charles Barkley and most recently LeBron James and his superstar son.
Why you ask? Most people watching the 2017 NCAA tournament had never heard of LaVar Ball and his three sons prior to the beginning of the season. Now they can’t escape him.
Regardless of your opinion, LaVar has already won. In a world of mass marketing, any news is good news. Any moment talking about him and his children is one minute less talking about their competition. We are in a scarcity economy, no longer an information age. The content of your message is now less important than having your message heard, and more importantly, differentiated from the rest. LaVar Ball has become the most fascinating name associated with the NCAA tournament and he’s watching it from the stands. He is the Donald Trump of the NCAA. He’s the P. Diddy of basketball. He’s the Kris Jenner of sports. Except Suge Knight hasn’t chastised him for putting himself in videos, yet.
The Ball brothers first gained notoriety for being breathtakingly good at basketball. However, being a talented high school player isn’t unique, so LaVar’s brash, Don King Jr. approach to promotion has lifted their story from the back page to the front. The current president of the United States won an election by speaking louder and more often than any other candidate was willing or able to. Without spending much of his own money, his campaign was funded by cable news networks’ willingness to freely report on the latest outrageous stump speech.
Falling the lead of the POTUS, LaVar was behind a Christmas-themed reality show where the gifts to his kids were, you guessed it, his Big Baller Brand apparel.
We may not like the fact that the Kardashian children were packaged and sold to us by their mother, but we didn’t think it to be inherently evil. Unlike Kris Jenner, LaVar actually trained his kids to have a discernible skill, while Kim and Co. are simply famous for being famous.
It’s not the end of the world that he’s teaching his sons to be engaged in developing and using their business acumen and not just their athletic exploits. When you consider around 60 per cent of NBA players are broke just five years after they retire, it is smart to have his sons contemplate financial literacy before they get money to blow.
For all the things he may have done wrong there is no question he’s done things right. He kept his kids at home for high school instead of shuttling them across the country in the search of athletic advancement over education. Chino Hills is far from a basketball factory but that didn’t make him interrupt their normal ascension.
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The “Keeping up with the Ball brothers” culture might be parental misconduct or promotional mastery, or both. But it has made the NCAA tournament and NBA draft for the next three years infinitely more fascinating.
But are his kids winning in this equation?
As the documentary “Trophy Kids” demonstrated, sports parents who push too hard for the wrong reasons can do more harm than good and leave their children with self-esteem issues.
As for the Ball brothers: they have never been in trouble, have good grades and to this point, seem nothing but polite.
All of this is harmless if the Ball kids want to prove that they have the mental toughness to deal with criticism like Tiger Woods and Serena Wiliams. It is just as likely LaVar makes the already difficult task of being a world-class athlete more difficult like it was for the Rasmus brothers and the young Jennifer Capriati.
We won’t know the answer to this sociological experiment for years to come.