Fans are fans, and we are not well. It’s July 4, 2016. I’m on my in-laws’ deck eating watermelon and refreshing dubya dubya dubya dot the players tribune dot-com. I’m refreshing it over and over and over. I’m doing this because I’m an Oklahoma City Thunder fan and Kevin Durant is a free agent. The silky forward’s been in the Hamptons recently, taking meetings with several teams hoping to woo him and his jumper away from my Thunder, and today’s the day he tells the world where he’ll play basketball next season. The teams vying for his services are the Boston Celtics, L.A. Clippers, San Antonio Spurs, Miami Heat, and Golden State Warriors. He’s said he’ll make his announcement via The Players’ Tribune. I am terrified.
At 11:38 a.m. Eastern time, Durant tweets the words “My next chapter” along with a Players’ Tribune link. There’s also a picture of him, between bushes, wearing a sleeveless shirt. My heart sinks before I even click. “Next” implies moving on from “now.” I read the story. Well, “read.” I scan is what I do, and I scan hard. Bottom of the second paragraph, he gives his decision. “I have decided that I am going to join the Golden State Warriors.” Dude, what?
I read it again because eyes can deceive. So can the brain. My brain once told me I could stick a button up my nose and get it out no problem. I was 6. It was stuck there for five hours. Back to the bottom of the second paragraph. My sails long for wind. “I have decided that I am going to join the Golden State Warriors”? That’s what the sentence says?! I’m reeling. The watermelon provides zero comfort, and I decide I’ll start drinking early. Several thoughts do battle in my skull.
What is going on? Why am I at the bottom of the ocean? This is so stupid. Durant did wonders for the city and the state, put them on the map globally for something positive, was great to the fans, stepped up in times of hardship, donated a million bucks to tornado relief after a twister razed the OKC suburb of Moore. I have a shirt that says “Durantula,” and now I can’t wear it anymore. Maybe I’ll bury my head in the sand. This is so stupid. They just beat you, and you join them? Draymond Green went on a nonstop nut-kicking palooza, and you thought, You know what, that’s the kind of guy I want to play with. Do you even care about Steven Adams’s berries, Kevin? How could you do this to Steven’s berries? You were right there. You had the best view in the house. This is so, so stupid.
More From Traitors Week
I walk around the deck in a daze. I feel like I’ve been punched. Does this mean that Russell Westbrook will leave, too? I sit back down. Haze in the head. The past screams. My wife comes out. She doesn’t even need to ask. I look like I’ve been run over. My crest has fallen. “The Warriors,” I say. “Gross,” she says. I agree.
The basketball internet’s coming apart like Gotham General. Some burned jerseys. Some posted cupcakes. YouTuber LostNUnbound went on a four-minute, 10-second tirade that to date has more than 3 million views on YouTube. People love a good crash out.
And this was one mammoth crash out. A supercharged, neck-veins-bulging, spittle-at-the-corner-of-the-mouth, slam-the-desk crash out. One of the finest you’ll ever see. An exemplar of the form, really. “Hyprocrite!” LostNUnbound screams. “I hope you never win anything in your entire life in the NBA,” he shouts. He runs through several of Durant’s past comments. There’s the old “Now everybody wanna play for the heat and the Lakers?” tweet KD sent back in July of 2010. And another old tweet says, “This free agency stuff is gettin outta hand…it’s like a episode on HBO.” I always wondered what show he was referencing. Maybe Curb? Surely Larry has some takes on free agency. Maybe Funkhouser isn’t as pro-player as Leon thinks he should be? Maybe Susie wishes Carmelo had waited until he was a free agent to come to New York so the team didn’t need to part with her favorite player, Raymond Felton? At the two-minute mark, LostNUnbound fires off a “New home?!!! New home?!!! … I hope you have a new home in the dumpster with your career, ’cause that’s where it’s at. … You’ve literally gone from my favorite player to the most hated player I’ve ever seen. In a second. In a tweet. In a single headline.” And that’s how it goes sometimes. Love moves us to madness.
And that reaction was nothing compared with what happened when LeBron James left the Cleveland Cavaliers.
Some things about The Decision are easy to remember. LeBron’s shirt, a white and purple checkerboard button-up that ushered Cavs basketball into a temporary gingham apocalypse. The display fridges loaded with Vitamin Water. Jim Gray getting just a little too cute with it, asking coy questions, milking the hour-long running time to within an inch of its life.
Before LeBron announces his future NBA plans, fans gather outside the Boys & Girls Club of America on July 8, 2010 in Greenwich, Connecticut
But now, 15-plus years later, maybe the most enduring part of The Decision is how people reacted to it. The ceremonial jersey burnings. Men in flip-flops and cargo shorts, American Eagle polos, looking fresh out of the frat house basement of Beta Gamma Douche. They pose in a parking lot outside the Detroit Avenue Harry Buffalo in the Lakewood neighborhood of Cleveland. Scorched uniform at their sandaled feet, awash in flames, the number and name melting and peeling off the mesh. And on top of that jersey, they toss a Witness Nike T. And on top of that, they toss shirts that read, “Please Stay LBJ.” Sad boys on webcams, somberly taking off their Cavs hoodies. One guy sat at his computer, took his LeBron jersey off, raised a Cleveland Browns–branded trash can, and dropped the uniform inside. A couple of women stomped on one poster. The city of Cleveland tore down another. One dude stabbed a LeBron action figure with a pair of pliers. Fans are fans, and we are not well.
Everyone had something to say about it. Spike Lee called into SportsCenter to discuss it. Bieber tweeted, “KOBE WILL BE WAITING.” Steve Carell and Paul Rudd even parodied it for that year’s ESPYs. Shout-out Warren P. Chili. Then there was the letter.
If you were paying any attention to the NBA in 2010, you remember the letter. You remember that it was written by then–Cavs owner Dan Gilbert. You remember that it was forged in the most Comic of Sans. Maybe you even remember that it was typed in blue. Published on the Cavs website, the letter was 20 paragraphs long, with only four of them longer than a sentence. That’s how you know that it was absolutely unhinged. Below is a chart that tracks the relationship between letters with one-line paragraphs and how unhinged they are. There is undisputed statistical evidence that the number of one-line paragraphs is directly correlated to the extent of the fury.
Gilbert’s letter was pure resentment, steam-out-the-ears bitterness soaking through the page. At its best, it was absurd. At its worst, it was racist. The grapes were sour. The letter was 427 words and lived on the Cavs website for four years. Only when the LeBron going back to Cleveland rumors picked up was the letter taken down, the Cavs forced to delete the post on July 6, 2014, five days before James announced that he was coming home.
Somehow, Gilbert’s outrageous missive wasn’t even the most ridiculous piece of writing to come out of The Decision. That honor would go to Scott Raab’s The Whore of Akron. Subtitled: One Man’s Search for the Soul of LeBron James. Raab’s book was written in a yearslong froth in the wake of James’s departure for South Beach. The book is part love letter to Cleveland, part memoir, and part rage-fueled hatefest. At one point, Raab wishes for James to suffer a career-ending injury. At another point, he writes, “Behold this spoiled pissant basketball player who imagines that he’s standing tall because he took a televised shit on Cleveland and somebody with nothing to lose has yet to cap his silly ass.”
Raab calls James many things throughout the book. “A feckless child.” A narcissist. A fraud and a prima donna bitch. About the jersey burnings, Raab writes, “Those fans should have torched those jerseys with you and your sycophant posse wearing them.” And I don’t know, that feels like a little bit of an overreaction, no? Some of the insults are so over the top you wonder whether he’s joking, and in some cases he surely is, but the more you read, the more you get the feeling that Raab means most of it. His feeling is that, as someone from Cleveland, LeBron knows well the history of heartbreak that runs through Cavs, Browns, and Guardians fans. He feels like James should have known better than to divorce them so publicly, so callously, and this is true. James should have known better, but he didn’t, or if he did, he certainly didn’t act like it. The Decision was a terrible idea, a misfire of gargantuan proportions. It made James look arrogant, attention starved, and genuinely clueless. Does that mean someone should “cap his silly ass”? Gonna go with a no on that one.
In one scene in the book, LeBron and Cleveland legend Jim Brown are signing a blown-up Sports Illustrated cover. Afterward, James says, “Being from the younger generation and seeing everything he did for the city of Cleveland was awesome. We both know how much the fans love sports. Being a Clevelander, being from this area, I’ve had to learn to keep the momentum going after he passed the torch.” Raab responds with “You’re going to need that fucking torch, pally. It’s going to come in handy down in Dante’s ninth circle of Hell—at the very bottom—where the worst of sinners are encased in ice for the worst of human crimes: treachery.”
Fans are fans, and we are not well.
LeBron’s move to South Beach broke the basketball betrayal scale along with everyone’s brains. Fans’, execs’, players’, the media’s, everyone’s. People migrated from reality to a warped universe that janks up a person’s view of normalcy. They start using adjectives that should be reserved for Judas, Brutus, and the other world-historical traitors and fictional characters that populate The Ringer’s ultimate traitors bracket (vote today!). Coward, spineless, traitor, evil. These are words that should be used for elected officials, for ICE agents, for people who affect livelihoods, for matters of life and death.
People went so hard at LeBron in the wake of his move to Miami that by the time KD left Oklahoma six years later, fans didn’t really know what to do. Myself included. I did not want to be the type of person to start throwing around big, melodramatic, biblical words. The problem was that I had big, melodramatic, biblical feelings. I felt like, How could he do this to us?! This kind of dastardliness is unprecedented! When loyalty dies, so does the world! I am Rubinek. You stabbed me in the heart! I am Robinson. This is a betrayal on levels that no one’s ever seen! And that is all ridiculous, and embarrassing, and uncalled for, but that is fandom. It makes us irrational. It makes us dumb.
Fandom is a brain breaker, a call to leave reason at the door. It is placing your happiness in the hands of people you will never meet. It is rooting for laundry. It is foolish, exhausting, the behavior of the damned. To root for a group of strangers so hard that the outcome will affect your day, your week, your month, how ridiculous, how stupid. It is a declaration that you will be, at certain points in your life, absolutely, 100 percent batshit. Calling an athlete a traitor, a turncoat, a backstabber is born out of that impracticality, and that in turn is born out of love. It is a sick love, a twisted love, an unhinged and drunken love. But it is still love. Is it healthy? Not really, no. But it is love. And love makes fools of us all.
