Ja Morant and Allen Iverson

It’s good and bad

Ja Morant is not perfect, but he is a perfect icon of fearlessness. TIM NWACHUKWU/GETTY IMAGES

By strict definition, basketball is nothing but rules, the first baker’s dozen of which were written down in 1891 by a Canadian doctor who had some peach baskets, and football players who needed to exercise indoors through the cold Massachusetts winter.

But ain’t nobody paying 50 grand for season tickets to a bunch of rules. We are thrilled by the opposite. The magic of sports is that people fly over each other, crush each other, and do all manner of things that would be upsetting or illegal in the grocery store, post office, or cube farm. So yes, regrettably, there must be a few rules to keep sports from becoming war. But they’re pretty close, and we love that.

Marvel movies do the same thing. Did somebody make you feel small? Marvel lets you imagine how you’d really respond if you had a writing staff, Hollywood’s best muscles, and not a care in the world about getting fired or arrested.

At their best, sports spice up our sense of what’s possible, and maybe even allow us to find our own turbo buttons.

Not every NBA player has this. Nikola Jokić might be the best player alive, but doesn’t often rearrange our sense of human potential. Imagine if the Nuggets’ slow 7-1 center were as small as you and me: the NBA would eat him alive.

Us regular folks need someone to dream on.

So I don’t take Ja Morant lightly. If the most powerful thing sports can do is make anything seem possible, then Morant might be the MVP. Whoever’s supposed to be in charge–Taylor Jenkins, Adam Silver, Joel Embiid in the photo above–Ja treats with immense and obvious disdain. Ja has a “beneath no one” tattoo, and he lives like it. He has scaled a very tall mountain–to NBA All-Star–doing almost every little thing his own damned way. The beat writers and commentators who are so sure he should get with the program have never been anything like so successful. He’s a legend.

Is there an NBA player you’d rather watch to get fired up to do hard things?

In all-around giant-slaying sauce, Ja reminds me most of Allen Iverson. Neither went to Duke; both might have 29-inch waists. Both joined terrible teams. Both need the ball almost the entire time–the Sixers traded away Jerry Stackhouse because Iverson just couldn’t be himself with a guy like that. Something went wrong between Iverson and his first coach, Johnny Davis. And then–for years–Iverson feuded publicly and embarrassingly with his second coach, that ornery cur Larry Brown.

In their first three years together, Iverson and Brown won one lonely little playoff game as the front office tinkered. Would Larry Hughes work alongside Allen? Tim Thomas? Toni Kukoč? Was there anyone who could be paired with that mini-mega-talent who would make the team a winner? Mostly they subtracted players who needed the ball a lot and added incredible defenders who didn’t mind watching Allen on offense.

Then in the 2001-2002 season, Larry and Allen, both stubborn as leather and with moms named Ann, learned to trust each other just a little.