Ja Morant is everything my young brain and body would’ve wanted from basketball. Fly first, ask questions later. Explode into orbit from anywhere. Talk yo’ existential shit. Hit the club after dropping 40 like your tenderloins won’t care because they stay stretchy.
That’s the essence of youth. Hubris too.
I’m not young, and it pains me, but I accept it. I went to the gym today and buckets of sweat floated up under waves of pressure. I got through it, and I’m no more or less sexy than when I came.
Jason Whitlock is the unsexiest monster ever forged in the anti-Black fire of American racism. He’s a Black sportswriter who’s made a Black million-dollar career from trashing Black culture. I can only line up these adjectives this way because that professional track only bubbled up through America’s bottomless gut for Black suffering.
His brand of self-hatred will always find its level. A handsome paycheck for whoever blasts the highest volume bigotry. The kind that makes us so disgusting and great.
I used to write letters to Jason Whitlock at Fox Sports when he covered the NBA in the 2000s. He designed content to provoke a fan like me, a young Black hoop sicko, I took his bait and I raged. Week after week, I wrote “ballstate0@aol,” double-checking my syntax.
He ain’t write back. I called him “Mr.” and everything. One bad decision after another.
Then, I got old. And Ja Morant started calling Klay Thompson ‘cooked,’ Klay of the Meg Thee Stallion fame. A basketball hubby, loving his career twilight after four rings and some of the baddest girlfriends in history. What’s not to love…
Instantly, the old man in me hated Ja.
“Leave Unc, alone! You’ll never know glory!” I shouted, to myself, inside. But like, am I just the Jason Whitlock of this moment? Have I aged out of loving players like Ja Morant? Am I unc? Am I chopped unc? What the fuck am I even saying?
The truth is, Klay is chopped. And he’s reached a higher apex than I ever have. So I must be super chopped. I am minced. I’m micro-planed.
While I’d love to get on my “Ja Morant won’t ever grow up” pedestal, I know I live a basic, repetitive fairytale that capitalism will deliver me to the edges of heaven. That my behavior will merit entry into the soft life. That I’ll follow the right rules and say the right things and violate only exactly who I have to violate to reach my fantasia.
Ja Morant’s hubris is perfect. He fuels the Black-joy-to-Black-destruction industrial complex as he’s meant to do. We are brothers in arms. Whitlock is a few steps ahead, steeped in sweet degradation like toxic tea.
I can’t let Ja Morant get me upset like this. I can’t let Jason Whitlock live to see me agree with him.