One of my favorite basketball anecdotes involves George (Iceman) Gervin sitting in the locker room, sometime in the late nineteen-seventies, after hitting a game-winning shot. Journalists crowd him asking locker-room questions: “How did you do it?” “How did it feel?” “What were you thinking?” After a brief pause, Gervin responds, “The world is round.”
I have always loved this line for its lordly belligerence (“You bore me,” it seems to imply) and because I feel it holds a profound truth about the game. There are lots of sports that involve a round ball, but basketball is the most cosmic and planetary. The ball itself, often seen spinning on the tip of a finger, is the size of a globe. The climax of every play involves a sphere, usually in rotation, entering a circle, its own brief eclipse. The most popular style of play in the N.B.A. these days is referred to as “pace and space.” A player with the ball in his hand is his own solar system of gravity and velocity.
One way to illustrate basketball’s cosmic, planetary nature would be to describe the game as played by the point guard Kyrie Irving. He has a center of gravity somewhere just above his knees and the coördination of a jazz drummer. He is an expert low dribbler, and in the middle of his moves, especially when he puts the ball behind his back, he sometimes seems to sit for an infinitesimal moment on an invisible chair. During the clannish, gossip-filled family reunion that is All-Star Weekend, I heard the theory that, among all N.B.A. players, Irving’s skills are the most envied. This is a category I had not previously considered—not M.V.P. but M.E.P. Irving’s moves with the ball are like physics problems that culminate with extremely high-profile clutch shots. He excels at humiliating the opponent. Maybe that’s what is envied.
As a kid, Irving spent hours with his father practicing shooting the ball using fantastical spins so that his shots would elude the outstretched arms of the defender and bounce off the backboard into the hoop. He is the master of the bank shot, not in the sense of Tim Duncan but, rather, of Minnesota Fats. When great dribblers like Jamal Crawford or Chris Paul or Irving do their thing, the announcers call it dancing, but these players are not dancing with the ball, exactly, or with the defender, or even with themselves. Like a pickpocket or a magician, they are dancing with the attention of their opponent. The whole point is to end up alone. Slowness, even stillness, is as important a feature of these moves as speed. When James Harden, another excellent dribbler, was hooked up to a machine to measure his athleticism, it turned out that his athleticism was truly exceptional, in relation to his N.B.A. peers, in just one category: the speed with which he could come to a complete stop, and then start again.
Irving’s father, Drederick, was a basketball star at Boston University, from which he graduated with a degree in economics. He worked as a bond analyst with Thomson Reuters. At one point, he played professionally in Australia, and that is where Kyrie Irving was born. Drederick grew up in the Bronx, a friend and teammate of Rod Strickland, the inventive, aggressive point guard who played in the N.B.A. for sixteen years. “My guys, like Drederick Irving, Kyrie’s father, and me, we would have a group of guys from our neighborhood and we would go to each neighborhood to play in the park,” Strickland remarked just a few years ago. “I’m scoring nineteen points per game in the league, going from playground to playground, park to park with a group of guys playing ball.” In that interview, Strickland seemed to emphasize how much less coddled and protected professional players were in the past, even as recently as the nineties. Kyrie Irving, on the other hand, was a basketball prodigy. There was no asphalt under his sneakers, no taking on all comers on a playground in the Bronx, or anywhere else. He spent a one-and-done season at Duke before declaring for the N.B.A. draft, in 2011, where he was the No. 1 pick.
Irving did something odd recently by declaring his belief that the Earth is flat. Irving’s remarks came on a podcast, “Road Trippin’ with R. J. & Channing,” with his teammates Richard Jefferson and Channing Frye and the host Allie Clifton. At the twelve-minute mark, they are all laughing and joking about aliens. Irving has always seemed like a guy with a good handle on irony, and his remarks about aliens seem mostly comical at first. “I wake up sometimes and I go outside, and I look. And I tell them, ‘Beam me up already! I have seen enough to really give you a report on how humans are!’ ”
After some discussion, Jefferson then asks Irving, sombrely and with the tiniest bit of trepidation, “Kyrie Irving, do you believe there are aliens?”
“Yes, I believe there are extraterrestrial beings that exist in the universe,” he responds.
“Yes, I would agree with that,” Jefferson says, relieved.
But, before he can wrap up and move on, Irving asks him, “Do you believe the Earth is round?
“Yes, I do.”
Moments later, the topic turns to the shape of the Earth, and Irving declares in an earnest tone, “The Earth is flat.”
All-Star Weekend commenced the next day. It is a time when thousands of people in the sports media congregate to write about not that much. So Irving was asked about it by ESPN. He elaborated, “I’ve seen a lot of things that my education system has said that was real that turned out to be completely fake. I don’t mind going against the grain in terms of my thoughts.”
Was Irving a fool? Or was he doing a bit of droll performance art on the subject of the media’s capacity to hyperventilate about celebrity—Andy Kaufman with a jump shot and a crossover? The next day, LeBron James was asked about it. “Kyrie is my little brother. He’s my All-Star point guard, superstar point guard. If he decides the Earth is flat, so be it. He’s an interesting guy, man. He believes it.” I spent All-Star Weekend trying to ignore the ensuing kerfuffle—Alternative Facts had been introduced by an All-Star. Best to forget about it.
It all seemed to go away until three weeks later, when Shaquille O’Neal said, on another podcast, in an earnest tone—though with Shaq, it’s impossible to tell—that he has driven all over the country, has never gone "up and down at a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree angle,” and has no doubt based on what he has seen that the Earth is flat. (Shaq later said he was joking, but still.)
At which point I decided to call the infamous basketball father LaVar Ball. Once you start contemplating outrageous remarks such as “The Earth is flat,” one’s thoughts naturally turn to even more outrageous remarks, like the ones that Ball has been making—that his son Lonzo, who played one year at U.C.L.A. and just declared for the N.B.A. draft, is better than Steph Curry; that he himself is holding out for a package sneaker-endorsement deal for all three of his sons for a billion dollars; that he could have beaten Michael Jordan in one-on-one when they were both young men in their prime. Then he said that LeBron James’s children would have the problem of dealing with expectations in a way that his own sons do not, eliciting a tart response from James.
Ball is certainly the father of three extremely talented basketball-playing brothers. He has started his own brand—Big Baller—and is often shown in videos walking around his home in Chino Hills, California, doing domestic things and making uxorious remarks about family life. His second and third sons are still on the Chino Hills high-school team, and they have also committed to U.C.L.A. The youngest, LaMelo, is a sophomore. I watched several of his games on YouTube, which I would be embarrassed to admit if I wasn’t among the hundreds of thousands of others who have done the same thing. One especially popular video features LaMelo as he brings the ball up court with his high, laconic dribble and points, repeatedly, at half-court. When he gets there, he launches a shot. It goes in—a half-court shot!—and he walks back on defense looking no more ecstatic than a person who has just refilled a parking meter.
I wanted to see if LaVar Ball was ready to declare the Earth round, but first I asked him about his parenting philosophy. He makes his sons focus on strength, skills, and conditioning—three is obviously an important number for him. Asked if he talks to his sons about the media attention that has come in the last few months, he said, “I don’t give them no media strategy. Think about what you say before you say it, but don’t make no regrets.” He said he doesn’t keep any trophies in the house, which is connected to his philosophy that good players make all the players around them better—and it’s true that Lonzo and LaMelo’s game is filled with court-long flings, often to their brother LiAngelo, as well as nifty pocket-pass dishes at close range.
I asked whether the boys complain about the “no trophies” thing.
“My boys don’t complain about anything,” Ball said. “When all you have to do is go to school, play basketball, what do you have to complain about?”
“How do you feel about Kyrie’s remarks about the Earth being flat?” I asked
“If that’s how he feels, I don’t know,” the most fearless dad in basketball said. “I don’t worry about what people say. It doesn’t affect me. Everyone can have their own opinion. People can say the Earth is square.”
After Irving made his flat-Earth remark, he subsequently seemed to dance around the subject, implying that the whole thing was a joke. A physics professor from Duke, Mark Kruse, was interviewed on the matter. “Perhaps he was using it (the Earth is flat) as a metaphor for just generally questioning established models of the universe, which in a sense is great,” he said. Or maybe it’s the opposite—if you are a basketball prodigy, you live in a bubble, through which, if you are a bright, inquiring kid, everything seems suspect. Maybe the statement isn’t a metaphor about questioning received wisdom but an allegory about what happens when all the world is, and always has been, a stage, and somehow unreal.
I was recently reading about how the first astronauts felt when they viewed Earth from space—a sense of the fragility and importance of the planet, a kind of radical humility that has been termed the “overview effect.” Writing in his book about the subject, the historian Frank White quotes the NASA astronaut Sandra Magnus about the experience of seeing Earth from this perspective: “It is all connected, it is all interdependent. You look out the window, and in my case, I saw the thinness of the atmosphere, and it really hit home, and I thought, ‘Wow, this is a fragile ball of life that we’re living on.’ ”