Being a Russell Westbrook fan is the emotional equivalent of playing basketball like Russell Westbrook—it’s spectacularly difficult, it takes willpower and imagination, it hurts, and if you’re not actually doing it, you probably can’t understand why anyone would try. When you are doing it, though, it seems to ... not make sense, exactly, but reflect a kind of higher logic, detached from the utilitarian logic of the game. Westbrook is one of the most frustrating players in the NBA, and quite possibly one of the most frustrating human beings in the universe, but for the true Westbrook fan, his shortcomings are merely the obstacles against which our greatness must test itself—the 10-foot rims and help defenses of the spirit.
My own odyssey of Westbrook fandom began innocently, like all melodramas. It was 2010, his second season in the league. I’d been vaguely aware that the Thunder’s young point guard was showing a bit of promise. But like everyone else, I’d been too busy gawping at Kevin Durant to pay much attention to anyone else on OKC’s roster, especially unheralded 21-year-olds with no obvious expectations of stardom. People forget this now, but during his last season at UCLA, Westbrook was the opposite of a lock. No one knew what to make of him. He had a highlight reel of mountain-toppling dunks, but his game was all over the place. There are actual scouting reports from this period in which he’s described—again, we’re talking about Russell Westbrook—as a potential defensive stopper. You might as well scout Icarus as “passionately in love with the ground.”
Then I saw him live. I’m from Oklahoma, but my wife and I were living in Boston, so when the Thunder came to town, we went to watch. Who was this kid playing so fearlessly, and why was he so much faster, more aggressive, and, like, weirdly boingy than everyone else on the court? Nothing seemed to intimidate him; put Kevin Garnett in his path and he’d only boing more ferociously. Jumping and twirling are bizarre things for grown-ups to care about, but basketball is a bizarre game. Sometimes it makes hopping into an emblem of the soul’s defiance. “Goddamn,” I murmured, intrigued.
As I watched Westbrook over the next few years, my “goddamn” gradually morphed, first into a state of wordless awe, and then into a state in which various punctuation marks spun around on my eyeballs, like slot machine cherries. Russ would plunge into a phalanx of four defenders, only to emerge flying at the rim for a bone-crushing dunk, and my eyes would go: !($;*%&@. Russ would miss four consecutive ill-advised pull-up jumpers, then drill a 3 at the halftime buzzer while falling out of bounds, and whoops, there went my pupils again: *$($*#(@)#.
Rational people would point out that his game wasn’t efficient. Look, they’d say, he loves bad shots. There are numbers that prove this, they’d say. Just look at this usage rate table! Only I would never manage to look at the usage rate table, because I was too busy murmuring things like “a red moon is rising in the west” and “as the stars foretold, a challenger spawned of fire.” And anyway, it’s impossible to see clearly out of an exclamation mark.
Still, even those of us who loved him realized that the deeper we got, the more complicated our fandom became. Russ’s game was nothing less than an attempt to overthrow the entire regime of basketball knowledge—to say, in effect, that one visitor from superhero dreamworld took precedence over values like “reliable efficacy” and “predicating actions on data” and “not basing your team’s entire season on the idea that you, personally, can transform into a hurricane.” But basketball knowledge exists for a reason, and you can’t kill the king partway. When everything was working perfectly, Westbrook seemed to afford us a glimpse of a higher basketball dimension. When it was only almost working, Westbrook’s play could look like inspired self-sabotage. He’d go for 38 points on 14-of-32 shooting in a four-point loss—and then show up after the game in his $5,000 beaver-print press-conference smock and cayenne librarian glasses and act like you were the alien for wondering what he was thinking.
Sometimes—for instance, during his entire 2016-17 MVP season—you couldn’t clearly say whether his game was working or not, and that was a whole other kind of disorienting. I almost always love athletes who make hard things look easy and easy things look hard. But there were weeks during that season when I’d look up from the TV and whisper “what ... is basketball?” And I’m a Thunder fan.
Appreciating Russell Westbrook, in other words, requires the ability to synthesize more contradictions before breakfast than a Stephen Curry devotee may face over the course of a long and untroubled life. What’s fascinating these days, with Westbrook playing about as badly as he has in recent history, is how all the contradictions we’ve amassed over our long history with Russ seem to speak to and inform each other. Westbrook fandom has levels, in other words. I count six, with more surely to come. Taken together, they make up a kind of mini-map of the joys and tensions of the NBA’s past decade.
Stage 1: A Quick Raise of the Eyebrows
It’s been a long time since anyone’s feelings about Russell Westbrook topped out at “mild interest”—it would be like feeling mild interest toward an avalanche. But this is me at TD Garden in 2010, watching a confounding new talent and wondering where he might take me. Surely someplace fun and in no way dangerous to my reason itself!! Stage 1 leads to ...
Stage 2: A Gasp
For a while, it seemed like Russ got noticeably better every time he touched the ball. This was the Youth in Revolt era of the giddy, good-vibes Thunder, all huge shots and Scott Brooks Mousse Advisories and shocking runs against the Kobe-era Lakers. Remember when everyone loved KD? Russ was suddenly a legitimate second option for him. In other words, he was a star, and it was a joy to watch him play.
”Wow, I can’t believe Westbrook, Durant, and James Harden will form an unbreakable core that will dominate the NBA for a decade or more,” I said. “But I can’t see what could possibly stop them.”
Stage 3: A Thoughtful Frown
Maybe he was ... too good? Anyway it started to seem like he was taking shots that should have gone to Durant, and he missed a lot of them, and even though he’d make up for it by, say, shouldering his way through three defenders and drilling a seemingly suicidal jumper with three hands in his face and 16 seconds left on the shot clock, it was concerning. In the national discourse of Russ, a thread of mistrust began to uncurl, like poison in a water glass. Sportswriters in Oklahoma started writing columns telling him to tuck in his Engineered Garments interview cuirass and buy some lenses for the librarian glasses.
But then, when he was injured, as he was during the 2013 playoffs (thanks, Patrick Beverley, may you never break out in a really annoying rash), OKC didn’t exactly look better. The Thunder needed Westbrook to win, but could they win with Westbrook? Was this the sort of thing you could solve with an app?
For quite a while, Westbrook fandom seemed poised between Stage 2—an ever-intensifying, ever-more awestruck Stage 2—and an uncertain dalliance with Stage 3. We gasped a lot, but we had calculators on our iPhones, and we worried.
Stage 4: A Tearful Gaze of Adoration
Then Durant left for Golden State. Westbrook re-signed, and at that moment, everything changed, at least for Thunder fans. OKC fans had spent the better part of a decade worshipping KD and not fully trusting Russ, only to realize they’d gotten it exactly backward. After losing Harden in 2012 and then Durant in 2016, Thunder fans felt—well, I can only speak for myself here, but I was starting to worry that the early success of the franchise was a mirage, that we were about to be consigned to Small Media Market Purgatory forever. Add to that the general feeling in Oklahoma that our state always gets overlooked, and you can see how Westbrook’s decision to stick with the Thunder resonated not just athletically but culturally.
To put it simply: He made Oklahoma feel like it mattered. You can’t overstate how much that meant to people, for an NBA superstar to claim the state in that way. No, it wasn’t a championship, but it was relevance, and in the middle of the country relevance counts for more than you might think. Then Westbrook started spamming triple-doubles, and a new wave of excitement carried us over into …
Stage 5: A Glassy Stare of Bewildered Yet Happy Denial
The MVP season was, in many respects, the pivotal moment of modern Westbrook fandom. It was where Stage 2 and Stage 3 finally achieved a perfect fusion—Westbrook was playing unforgettable basketball, and it was clear that OKC was never going to make a deep playoff run with him using the ball like that—only filtered through the adoration of Stage 4. The result was an apotheosis of pessimistic euphoria like nothing I’ve ever seen in sports.
It was euphoric because we were thrilled to see what Westbrook could do now that he was fully unleashed. It was pessimistic because we knew deep down that it was a sports version of the Charge of the Light Brigade. It was dramatic and frustrating and silly and extreme, like everything involving Westbrook. In a way it ran counter to the whole purpose of basketball, if the purpose is to win championships, but what image would you rather remember, Westbrook fighting the ocean single-handedly or Harden technically not traveling on yet another stepback 3?
When you look at that season week by week, month by month, it still defies all reason. He averaged a triple-double in a year when the Thunder lost to the Houston Rockets in the first round of the playoffs. He scored 51 points in Game 2 of that Rockets series ... and the Thunder lost by four. It was pointlessly beautiful, which is mostly all I ever want sports to be.
The English novelist Penelope Fitzgerald spoke somewhere about “the courage of those who are born to be defeated.” The Rockets are far too rational to have been born to be defeated. They still didn’t win a championship.
Stage 6: All of This at the Exact Same Time
I don’t know where we’re going. There are undoubtedly more contradictions to come, but at this point, it feels as though every previous layer of Westbrook fandom is operating simultaneously. The wild heat of the MVP season has cooled off a bit—his scoring is down 10 points per game, which clearly represents a concession to basketball sanity—and even though Paul George is very, very good, I think most Thunder fans have come to terms with the fact the team as presently constructed will never be a serious contender. At the same time, we’re currently third in the Western Conference. And Russ still means the world to Oklahoma. Rooting for Russ means rooting for someone who will do more than you thought was possible but will ultimately let you down; who will transcend basketball as we know it yet shoot 63 percent from the foul line and finish with the fifth seed in the West; who will brick an endless series of pull-up jumpers and then do something face-melting when the game is on the line, or when it isn’t on the line, or when no one is paying attention at all.
It may be a condition of Westbrook’s greatness that a team he leads will never fully be great. Watching him in 2019 is as exhausting as it is exhilarating, but I still think he’s a privilege to watch. It’s always a privilege to watch a superlatively talented person try to exceed themselves against impossible odds. As sports becomes increasingly data-driven and pragmatic—for good reason, but it’s hard on doomed poets—there aren’t many places left where those terms even make sense. In any case, I’m sticking with him through the tough times—which I guess are these?—just as I did during the times that were arguably (but who knows with Westbrook?) less tough. I’m ready to average an emotional triple-double. I’m putting in the work to have an 11-for-30, 25-point, 10-rebound, 14-assist stat line of the heart.
