Our personalities are not our friends
Athletes aren’t the only ones for whom self-expression = self-sabotage
The five-year life of the Golden State Warriors’ dynasty was fun while it lasted — and much-celebrated. None of us could have expected how sudden would be its collapse. (To what could we compare it — the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989!?) While this collapse is the subject of schadenfreude for many, to the cast of characters actually on the team, it is a painful exposure of fatal flaws that ended the dynasty. For Kevin Durant, I’ll argue (eventually), personality is such a flaw, marring a brilliant athletic career. (EDITOR’S NOTE: I’ll ultimately fail in this argument and throw up my hands at my own exasperating personality.)
When Kevin Durant re-injured his leg in the NBA Finals, suffering an Achilles tendon tear less than an hour into his comeback from a previous calf-strain injury, it was such a painful moment I briefly resolved (in that moment) to stop following basketball. I thought: Who cares if the Warriors win or lose now? The dynasty has been broken, the possible redemption story derailed. Instead, not only would Durant’s season end with him on the bench, injured — but the injury would open up a potential rift between him and the Warriors, with him having risked his own personal safety to help them, and them having allowed him to do so. His impending decision over where to go as a free agent now seemed much more likely to end in separation.
The giant dominoes that have crashed down in the aftermath of this have been significant and swift. Klay Thompson’s equally severe injury a few days later, then Durant’s decision to leave; then the Warriors jettisoning Andre Iguodala — which made them actively complicit in their own demise. And then the Warriors, in the opening weeks of the 2019–2010 season, losing games by 30 at home to the Phoenix Suns. What on earth?! The Warriors’ incompetence last night was so staggering that Steph Curry’s injury in the second half of that game seemed an almost merciful fate — better to sit on the injured list than to be exposed to be so abruptly irrelevant.
I watched a 20-minute video by YouTuber Klay Allen that chronicled the end of the Warriors’ dynasty — not so much the events I mentioned above but how the seeds of Durant’s departure were sewn in his final season in Oakland. As so many have written, he never truly fit in in Oakland, and the Warriors were in some ways always Steph’s team. When I wrote about hoping Durant would stay with the Warriors, I was reacting to this dynamic, hoping for his sheer excellence to allow him — and them — to overcome it.
To me, the Durant injury was tragic in part because it made this impossible. And with his departure, the subsequent days and months have led to not only the disintegration of the Warriors but also the beginnings of a rift between the players on the team — and that rift, which I suspect will only widen over time, will be tragic in its own way. It’s one thing for team members officially to part ways; it’s another for them to publicly break the bonds that made them an inspiring team in the first place.
That YouTube video suggests that on a talented Warriors team those bonds weren’t firmly in place. The Warriors managed to win without truly bonding with Durant, and this led him to waver in his commitment to the team at the start of the 2018–2019 season. This wavering affected the whole team, and it burst out in Draymond Green’s outburst at Durant at the end of a early-season 2018 game. The video argues that the outburst, though difficult, was healthy and had the potential to strengthen the team’s bonds. It represented a greater level of honesty between the team and Durant. Durant, though shook, rebounded from it with a memorable 144 points over three games at the end of November. The stage was set, as I wrote, for a redemptive triumph for team and player. Instead, we had the injury.
And now, four months later, we have Curry’s injury. He joins Durant, now, as a sidelined observer. Like Durant and Thompson, he will be much sought-after as a subject of interviews. And in these interviews, the ex-teammates will be asked to talk about each other. When Durant left the Warriors, he broadcasted no ill will toward his former teammates, and they were similarly loyal toward him. But the more time they spend apart, the more they are asked about how their partnership ended, the more they will be tempted, answering the questions of reporters, to blame each other. Today Durant, who has already been sidelined the longest, appears to be the first to give in to that temptation.
In doing so, he speculates that there were plenty of sensible reasons to leave. He’s not being unreasonable in saying so. It is hard to imagine, he points out, how the Warriors would have paid everyone. The Warriors resigned Thompson and Green in the aftermath of his departure, to contracts they wouldn’t have been able to afford had Durant stayed. In a sense, then, maybe his teammates pointed him to the door, and he only walked through it. As I write this, I myself seem to be spending most of my words in this article talking myself out of my original thesis — that Durant’s personality is what upset the apple cart of the Warriors’ dynasty.
But the point of my original thesis is that Durant’s refusal to embrace that Warriors’ scenario — because of injury, because of the salary cap, because of whatever extenuating circumstances — was ultimately his refusal, and it was in a way a product of his peculiar nature. Cowherd refers to it by calling him a “wanderer,” others are less charitable. They talk about his being hypersensitive to what people say about him on social media, as if it is a manifestation of a certain self-obsession.
Probably, they are projecting. Who isn’t self-obsessed? But that’s why this argument came to me in the first place. If Kevin Durant’s personality is what broke up the Warriors’ dynasty, that should be of little surprise — we are all always being betrayed by our own human nature. My “shoulda coulda woulda” conclusion, that Durant should have stayed with the Warriors, if only he could have ignored the voices in his own head, is not really supported by good sense. Why would he be any better than the rest of us at ignoring said voices? Whose voices is he supposed to heed, if not his own?
No, these are the natterings of a Warriors fan who just still can’t believe what he just saw, or is seeing — a collapse of such epic proportions. The Warriors dynasty was built seemingly overnight — five years ago this month the Warriors started winning at an epic clip after years of mediocrity and much worse. And now, those players are either injured or they play for other teams, and the Warriors as they are currently constituted are as bad as they ever were. All structures are transient, Eckhart Tolle said. This is the truth. Is it our fatal flaws that are the cause of our mortality? Probably so, but I don’t suppose there’s anything we can do about it.
In other words, if you don’t like your personality, get a new one. But for Kevin Durant and the Warriors, it wasn’t that their personality was particularly dysfunctional — but that every personality is dysfunctional. If anything, the fatal flaw in the personality was and is competitive-ness, or ego, and every personality has that.