It’s Kyrie Irving’s World Now
This season, Kyrie Irving is a man transformed. On the court, he’s pretty much the same player. What’s changed is his public persona. We all assumed that Kyrie wanted out of Cleveland because he wanted to be The Man. As it turns out, he didn’t envy LeBron’s stat lines. Instead what he craved was a platform—something he’d never get with James’s celebrity hogging the spotlight. In Boston, he’s the main attraction, which means unfettered attention.
Irving earned instant notoriety when he asked the tough questions about the Earth’s shape. But while it became a running punchline, it never really defined him because we couldn’t pin down intent. Did he really believe this? Was he in on the joke? Was he being irresponsible? Because we didn’t really know Kyrie—or even care to know him—we almost didn’t care. On the Cavaliers, Irving was the classic younger sibling: He was deemed capable enough for us to neglect him in good conscience.
Right now, it’s impossible to ignore him. After LaVar Ball, he’s the NBA’s premier sideshow, whether he’s dissing the entire city of Cleveland, rejecting Christmas as a valid holiday, planning an anti-capitalist “self-sustaining community,” or going vegan because “steak doesn’t come from anything natural.” Instantly quotable, reliably outrageous, and smart enough to spin a real yarn, Kyrie has established himself as a full-fledged personality, eager to hold court and break down how things really work.
It’s smart business, and already we’ve seen marketing that embraces his new role around the league. But he doesn’t seem to just want attention to further his brand. This isn’t some Andy Kaufman–esque stunt; he’s not playing a character. And Kyrie’s not just talking to hear himself talk. Undeniably, all this means something to Kyrie Irving. Exactly what that is—and what, if anything, we’re supposed to do with it—remains an open question.
Last week was major for Kyrie-ologists. Appearing on J. J. Redick’s podcast, Irving unleashed some of his deepest thinking yet, covering off third-eye spirituality, government conspiracy theories, the symbolic weight of Jim Carrey, and a dash of “what if dinosaurs never happened?” If Kyrie was all in good fun before, it’s now become indisputable that one of the league’s most prominent voices is unafraid to broadcast his most outré takes. It’s refreshing that an athlete feels comfortable speaking this freely, and both entertaining and disconcerting that this is what comes out of his mouth. We often praise athletes who are “unfiltered,” or at least ogle them approvingly; Irving is something else altogether. In giving him free rein, we’ve convinced him that every stray conjecture and errant line of thinking is worth verbalizing, that whatever he thinks is automatically good content.
The more absurd Kyrie becomes, the more we want of him; the more we laugh at him, the larger he looms; every time we gawk at him, his words linger further. As with LaVar Ball, we’ve created a monster through a combination of vague disapproval, morbid curiosity, and a perverse desire to see sheer anarchy loosed upon the NBA. Irving is perceived as a crackpot, or maybe just a goofball. He’s an oasis of weirdness that’s all too rare in professional sports. But what if Kyrie is the last sane one in a world that’s gone completely mad?
What no one seems to get is that even Kyrie himself has no idea whether we’re supposed to take him seriously. It’s become clear that Irving, if he even believes anything he says, isn’t trying to change anyone’s mind or indoctrinate impressionable fans. He rambles, contradicts himself, rarely presents any real argument, and never revisits topics. Kyrie is just riffing, blowing his own mind and hoping, maybe even charitably, to do the same for anyone listening. It’s less “this is how things are” and more “wouldn’t it be crazy if…” He’s a contrarian utterly convinced of his own genius, even if the rest of us recognize much of what he says as barely warmed-over memes or blazed dorm-room debates.
We indulge Kyrie because it suits us, and the NBA is far sillier and more colorful for having him in it. But he serves a dual purpose. When we drag Kyrie—the more dismissive we are of him—we do so to assuage some deep-seated cultural anxieties around the concept of truth. There is no truth, or at least one single agreed-upon version of it, in American public life these days. That’s a hard pill to swallow for anyone who has staked their personal, political, or professional life on Getting It Right, the faulty assumption that having the correct answer or being the smartest person in the room is a substitute for real power. While post-truth society can be disturbing, it’s also currently a fact of life. Viewing it as a crisis or bemoaning the death of The Real isn’t just an unhealthy, counterproductive fetish. It’s grief for a thing that never was, or at least maybe never should have been relied on so heavily. And it’s high time we left it behind.
In the era of #fakenews, it’s not exactly encouraging that an NBA All-Star is out here spewing anti-science gibberish. But what if Kyrie Irving is a tool for liberation, an object lesson in just how foolish it is to listen to people like him? We should pay more attention to him, not less, because humoring him makes it nearly impossible to cling to faulty assumptions that no longer square with reality. Kyrie Irving isn’t the problem. The problem comes when we expect him to make sense when the world no longer makes sense. The solution isn’t to tune him out. It’s to listen even harder until we realize the point is to not listen at all. This is who Kyrie Irving is. The real question is, who are we?
