LaVar Ball always has a smile on his face. Omnipresent as it is, his expression is no one’s first association with the Biggest Baller of them all. But as he closed out 2017 with one last flourish—announcing, after tussling with the NCAA, that his company Big Baller Brand will start its own professional league for basketball players stranded between high school and the pros—it’s worth asking. Why won’t LaVar Ball stop smiling?
The simplest answer is that LaVar Ball, in the most brute, 2016 sense of the word, is winning. He craves antagonism. He moves forward only when he’s reacting to or pushing back against a worthy opponent, whether that’s sneaker companies, the NCAA, skeptics in the media, Lakers brass, or the President of the United States. And so far, without ever quite getting the credit he deserves, Ball has vanquished them all, or at least held his own.
That sounds like a ridiculous assertion. LaVar Ball needs to pick fights in order to keep fighting, to keep new opponents lined up. But it’s unclear why his adversaries engage with him in the first place. He’s consistently punching up, going after targets who don’t need to give LaVar Ball the time of day. Self-promotion is his single greatest skill—some would argue it’s his only skill—and Ball maintains a presence in the news cycle that makes it impossible to not humor him. It’s also only gotten easier, as LaVar and company are a proven source of clicks and a no-brainer for coverage on networks like CNN. Who knows whether Lonzo Ball, his quiet and eldest son on the Lakers, or BBB are going to be successful. It seems almost beside the point. They’re surviving. They’re not going anywhere. And we’ll keep talking about them.
Ball is also often called a troll when trickster would be more accurate. For all his bully-ish tendencies, Ball is an underdog reliant on asymmetry. His refusal to abide by basic ground rules messes with people's heads, to the point where the worst he can do is force a draw. In May, when BBB dropped the ZO2, its first sneaker, it wasn’t just presented as an alternative to Nike or Adidas. Ball set the price point so high that it posited BBB as a luxury brand. It was, on the surface, the dumbest possible way to go at the major companies; conventional wisdom has always held that lower prices could make a scrappy upstart competitive. The move, while it prompted ridicule, made Ball and BBB almost too out there to disqualify. By ignoring common sense, Ball was able to force BBB into the same lofty conversation as his perceived competition.
The same could be said of his war on the NCAA. LiAngelo Ball, the least likely to make the NBA of the three, could benefit most from college seasoning and exposure. He also, given his recent arrest, couldn’t exactly claim the moral high ground. But that’s exactly what LaVar did. And here again, defying common sense has worked out pretty well for him. LaVar’s master plan, such as he has one, is improvisatory. (If anything, his dust-up with Trump quickly evaporated because it felt scripted, even inevitable.) He’s confident to the point where he’ll take dumb risks and throw himself out there with abandon because, at least for now, he knows he’ll land on his feet.
Public relations, as much as anything his sons do on a basketball court or BBB’s bottom line, is how LaVar Ball shrewdly keeps score. He is a spectacle, largely by design, because he knows his visibility is key. This makes him an entertainer; his underrated Ball in the Family reality show, which actually humanizes LaVar to a high degree, seems almost beside the point. In order to play that game, he has to smile and make himself palatable; otherwise, he risks being cast as an Angry Black Man, uppity (as in Donald Trump’s typically dim view), or an ill-tempered troublemaker, which plays right into the hands of the people who can stand to lose something if LaVar proves right. While Ball’s grin may appear to play into racialized stereotypes, it in fact allows him to subvert such thinking.
Silly as LaVar can seem at times—and make no mistake, he’s having a blast, and probably also grinning broadly because of that—he’s also made a career out of speaking truth to power, however haphazardly. Ball doesn’t arbitrarily seek out conflict. He lashes out against institutions and individuals with authority when, in his role as mutant sports dad, he butts up against them and senses their unfairness. Sneaker companies laughed when he demanded equity, which would be a totally reasonable request for a high-level employee at any other job. He chafed at the NBA’s age limit, the NCAA’s exploitation of unpaid athletes, the draft’s arbitrary assignment of employer, and a president who is an even bigger bully than he is. LaVar Ball smiles because he knows he’s very often right. He’s not a freedom fighter or reacting out of spite. He’s a contrarian always inclined, no matter how long the odds, to ask, “Why does it have to be that way?”
But Ball takes on structural unfairness in the world of sports because that’s his job. He’s smiling because his heart is in the right place. Whatever you think about him, you’d never accuse him of not trying to advance his sons’ careers. Accusing him of opportunism or shameless self-promotion overlooks the fact that all of his stunts are tied to a specific end that, far-fetched as it may seem, benefits Lonzo, LiAngelo, or LaMelo. They are the source of his ambitions. He knows that if his kids weren’t high-level basketball talents, not only would he have no leverage—he probably wouldn’t be doing any of this in the first place. LaVar Ball isn’t taking advantage of their talent; he’s not moved by his own good fortune. He’s glad that he’s in a position to make things good for them. And sappy as it sounds, that should be enough to put a smile on anyone’s face.
