LaVar Ball, Donald Trump, and the Year of the Ego Trip

This article originally appeared on this site.

A couple of years ago, only the most fastidious basketball nerds knew of LaVar and Tina Ball and their three sons, the gifted young athletes Lonzo, LiAngelo, and LaMelo. This was partly by design. To avoid the high-profile youth-basketball circuit, where exposure demands endless cross-country tours, and to keep his family a close-knit unit, LaVar started his own local team in 2012, allowing his sons to continue to play together without having to venture far from their family or their quiet Southern California home. Meanwhile, LaVar set about developing his kids’ careers on his own terms, and turning the family name into a business. He launched the reality series “Ball in the Family” and started Big Baller Brand, a sneaker company that considered Nike and Adidas competitors. As the Ball family’s success grew, LaVar’s pride in his sons’ talent seemed more and more insatiable. His aggressive bluster, such as trash-talking LeBron James and Michael Jordan, often overshadowed his sons’ accomplishments. During a radio interview, LaVar proclaimed that his eldest son, Lonzo, would only ever play for his home-town team, the Los Angeles Lakers. Lonzo was, after all, better than Stephen Curry—at least, according to his dad.

There were aspects to all this I found charming—LaVar’s fierce devotion to his family, the challenge he posed to the sneaker-industrial complex, the fact that he had basically hustled his way into the spotlight. Yet there was also something troublingly familiar about him, too. His love for attention and his own name pointed to another man who courts fame and infamy alike, a man who is also renowned for believing his own hype and who remains oddly sensitive when someone suggests that he’s any less of a winner than he claims to be. It felt inevitable that Donald Trump and LaVar Ball would collide in 2017.

In early November, LiAngelo Ball and two of his U.C.L.A. teammates were arrested in Hangzhou, China, where the team was playing its season opener. A surveillance video allegedly showed them shoplifting from a Louis Vuitton store. The players were detained in a hotel for a few days and then allowed to return home, at which point Trump swooped in and claimed credit for negotiating their release. The players and their school offered him perfunctory thanks. But LaVar refused, as there was no proof that the President had done anything. His troll-ish insubordination infuriated the President, who fired off some tweets and called LaVar an “ungrateful fool.” “If I was going to thank somebody, I probably would thank President Xi. He’s the President of China,” LaVar said during a twenty-minute interview, on CNN. “LaVar is just a poor man’s version of Don King, but without the hair,” Trump tweeted. Reason alone could not convince either of these men that he was even a little bit wrong. For a couple of days, the President and a self-made man whose fame derives from his eldest son’s eye for a good pass tried to outdo each other on Twitter.

It was bizarre to think that LaVar’s bravado might irritate Trump enough to trigger an international incident, and yet it was exactly the kind of moment that we’ve come to expect this year—weirdly funny and then, ultimately, a little tragic. In the aftermath of the feud, the beloved actor LeVar Burton, of “Reading Rainbow” and “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” was caught in the crossfire and harassed by confused, pro-Trump, anti-Ball types. Collateral damage of someone else’s ego trip, a feeling we have come to know all too well.

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