A sizable part of LaVar Ball’s appeal for people he happens to appeal to is that he’s a walking, talking distillation of many of the half-baked but smart-sounding arguments about sports that often occur in barbershops, during happy hours, over barbecue pits, at spades tables, and on the bleachers of ****** league football games. It’s in those predominately black spaces that you will find people like him; large in personality (and often also large in stature) men who are so easily affable and funny and demonstrative and bombastic — and so sure of the things they’re saying — that they seduce people who either latch on to the one truthful nugget in their avalanche of bull**** or just plain want to be seduced by such an important seeming man.
Of course, these types of men don’t only exist in black spaces. Just a year ago, (white) America was seduced by an affable and funny and demonstrative and bombastic man who also seemed very sure of the things he was saying. It didn’t — and still doesn’t — matter that he’s full of ****. He had (and has) big sounding ideas, easy answers to impossible questions, and an uncanny ability to shift to the next pitch when the details of the current sale are asked to be provided. Donald Trump, like LaVar Ball, isn’t just a salesman. He’s a confidence man.
Where Ball’s blackness matters, however, is when adding the context of this black man challenging the predominately white power structures of amateur and professional sports — the NCAA and the shoe companies specifically. So even if you don’t particularly **** with him (and I don’t), it’s hard not to root even a little bit for a man who takes those half-baked barbershop arguments and applies them on a national level.