The Shakespearean Tragedy of Luka Doncic

in which i try to talk about sports

You know how to ball, I know Aristotle

— Taylor Swift, “So High School”

Watching basketball with men is not dissimilar from watching reality television with women. If you enter one of these spaces as a casual viewer you will realize that, although ostensibly everyone has gathered to watch something, the real joy is in talking over it. Men will occasionally punctuate their game-long conversations about trades or off-court drama with involuntary vocalizations in response to the actual gameplay. Women, considerately, will often pause the show at a crucial moment to explain to me what happened in season 2 that made this particular insult all the more biting. Both experiences are enhanced by context; the real fans are engaging with the meta-story that lays over any given game or episode.

I was never terribly interested in the meta-story around sports until college. In my sophomore year, I took a Sociology class taught by an elderly lesbian couple, which has so far been one of the most premier experiences of my entire life. We got to talking about labor and ownership and capital, and my eighteen-year-old brain was beginning to fire past the introductory thoughts of “rich people bad,” into some more coherent political ideas. I began to think of the professional athlete’s relationship to his own labor — specifically, about the process by which teams will buy, sell, and trade players. I began to think, not just about who had the most money in the world, but how that money was made, and who was in charge of the labor which created value.

Basically, sports helped me understand Baby’s First Marxism. And thinking of sports through a lens of labor helped me become more invested in conversations around them. I now knew that a “trade” happened without the knowledge or consent of a player — that when a player was “bought,” it was the owners of the teams who were exchanging money. It gets dark when you think about the racial disparities, specifically when it comes to football. I now know that when a player gets traded or bought by a new team, they have to move themselves and their families. Despite the multi-million dollar contracts, ultimately there is an owner and there is a player.

This kind of archaic setup carries with it the old-world drama of monarchy. These players become pieces on the chessboard of team owners, who can swap them around for better players, better press, or no reason at all. The fans feel attached to certain players or the makeups of certain teams — there are fantasy leagues dedicated to being your own kind of kingly team-owner, perhaps to dissipate some of the natural anxiety that comes with stanning in such a chaotic, uncertain environment. The logical conclusion of such an arrangement is that, eventually, a trade will be made that seems so shocking, so unjust, that it turns the whole community on its head.

Enter: Luka Doncich.¹