DO WE LIKE THE ALTERNATE VERSION OF KYRIE IRVING? FOR NOW, I KIND OF DO
We’re not sure what happened to the antisemitic dope and vaccine-hating mope, but Irving has rediscovered his basketball self in Dallas, where he isn’t far from an NBA Finals run against … the Celtics
Did he abduct himself? An interdimensional universe functions in other forms of TV, no doubt. But dressed in a spiffy suit and tie and smiling while clutching an NBA microphone, Kyrie Irving isn’t the victim of a mysterious illness or a conked head. He appears to have been enhanced by remaining unvaccinated — for worse … or even worse — without mass groaning that he should help battle COVID-19.
And he is starting to sense what seemed impossible in Brooklyn and Boston. Might he reach the conference finals with the Dallas Mavericks, whose operations are run by a Jewish man, Mark Cuban, though Irving was banned five games by the Nets in 2022 amid allegations he was antisemitic and “unfit to be associated” with the team? For the longest time, the league was prepared to ship him to another solar system and assume he left his best moment eight years ago, when he hit the winning three-pointer against Steph Curry and gave LeBron James his one title in his native Ohio region.
But here is Irving, 32 with a groomed beard and facial hair (and a four-inch earring), speaking fondly of his pleasant experiences with Luka Doncic and Jason Kidd as his coach. I can’t remember the last time he had a pleasant experience in life, basketball or generally. That said, he hit a crazy southpaw floater to win Game 3 against Oklahoma City, and suddenly, you realize the young Thunder have no one to match his postseason wisdom, just as the young Minnesota Timberwolves would have the same issue. Can you imagine something more outlandish than Irving returning to the Finals against the Celtics, assuming the Boston police wouldn’t send him to lockup?
We’ll never know, of course, what he might do next. For now, he focuses on a team that wanted his services and ignored his fractious past. The relationship is working, thanks to Cuban’s patience and Kidd’s freedom, and hearing him in a press conference Saturday, Irving is putting aside his religious wrath and vaccination abhorrence. Is he finally growing up? Is he learning how to live with the madness? Let him speak for the first time in ages.
“It’s not so much about proving anything. I believe it’s just putting the basketball game into perspective,” he said. “I think Josh Hart (of the Knicks) had a tremendous quote where he talked about people having 12-hour shifts — and we get to go out there and play the game that we love. That hit the nail on the head for a lot of us and the way we are feeling. It doesn’t take away from our competitive spirit and what we want to accomplish as legacy members of the NBA.”
Hold on, bub. Why all this about seeing the world in a bigger place? He didn’t care about millions of New Yorkers when he blew off the vaccine and played only 29 of 82 regular-season games two seasons ago. Now he does, evidently. “A lot of us, we forget we are at the top of the top,” he said. “We have ascended here because of our hard work, ascended here because we sacrificed a lot of family time, and ascended here because we’ve done little things to be great teammates and enough to be recognized as some of the most special and talented players in the world. That’s one thing I can lay my hat on, being one of those people.”
Well, he was one of those people, more gifted than most players on any planet, Earth or otherwise. Where Irving lost us was when he said, freakily, how we could walk off the edge at any time. “The Earth is flat,” he said. “The fact that in our lifetimes that there are so many holes and so many pockets in our history. … All these things they keep giving to us, all this information, I’m just saying these things that used to put me in fear, it makes you not want to question it naturally, because of how much information you actually can figure out and how much information there actually is out there. It’s crazy. Anything that you have a particular question on, ‘Okay, is the Earth flat or round?’ I think you need to do research on it. It’s right in front of our faces. I’m telling you it’s right in front of our faces. They lie to us.”
When he said “they,” would he point them out? “The man,” he said. That segment alone put him on the opposite side of sporting heroes. Since then, he refused to allow even one vaccine shot before answering irresponsibly if he’d used a link to promote a film called “Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America.” Said Irving: “Please stop calling it a promotion. I put it out there, just like you put things out there. You put things out there for a living, right? Don't dehumanize me up here.” That prompted Nets owner Joe Tsai to say, “This is hurtful to all of us, and as a man of faith, it is wrong to promote hate based on race, ethnicity or religion. This is bigger than basketball.” And the NBA to say: “Hate speech of any kind is unacceptable and runs counter to the NBA's values of equality, inclusion and respect. We believe we all have a role to play in ensuring such words or ideas, including antisemitic ones, are challenged and refuted.”
So now, back in the roundball swing of life, Irving either wants us to forget or accept his horrendous decisions. I will do neither. But I’ll keep hearing him out. “I understand that the next generation is watching,” he said. “We want them to have this game to appreciate as a heart space and not just business, business, business. We should enjoy the competition, enjoy going against the best of the best. That’s where my focus has been. I get up every day, looking at my kids, looking at my wife, and look at kids playing basketball. This teaches you about teamwork, about leadership, about exercise, about guiding, about life. That’s what got me into basketball.”
The words hurled against him left pain, a burden he addressed at the end of his speech. “It wasn’t to be bombarded all the time everywhere I go. I hate the celebrity worship. I hate the idolatry,” he said. “I hate all the stuff that comes with extra nuances of being a — quote, unquote — famous person in the NBA. It’s about leading the next generation and understanding I must stay poised through the chaos and hate out here.”
Oh, it exists.
In Boston, fans are starting to learn about Irving’s comeback. They’ll always hate him, treating him uglier than all enemy athletes, remembering the night he stomped his foot on the Celtics’ midcourt logo at TD Garden. A 21-year-old creep hurled a Dasani water bottle at him, and police might remember when Irving said Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown didn’t know how to win championships. The city was disgraceful, he said. “It's just underlying racism, and treating people like they're in a human zoo. Throwing stuff at people, saying things,” Irving said. “You see people just feel very entitled out here. As a Black man playing in the NBA, dealing with a lot of this stuff, it's fairly difficult. You never know what's going to happen. I’m not the only one who can attest to this. It is what it is. The whole world knows it.”
Or when he said: “I don’t want to attack every Boston fan, but when people start calling you ‘Pussy’ or ‘Bitch’ and “F— you’ and all that stuff, there’s only so much you can take as a competitor.” Or when he told a New England reporter who wished him a happy holiday: “F— Thanksgiving.” His mood was contentious since he hit the winning shot for Cleveland, when he said of James, “Now I gotta adjust my game to this guy.” He escaped to Boston and Brooklyn for all-time abominations, meaning he wrecked the Cavaliers and two other franchises in six years.
Only he considers those profane seasons as a pause. Here is the new Kyrie Irving, according to Doncic, who is ailing and overweight and knows he’s right when he says, “He’s amazing. He’s trying to facilitate for everybody too, so he's doing it all on both ends on the floor. We appreciate having him.” And there was Irving after Game 2, on the road, handing his shoe to a young female fan and patting her on the head. It’s insane to remember when he said about LeBron and the Celtics when he pays tribute to Luka, who averaged 33.9 points, 9.8 assists and 9.2 rebounds in the regular season — the first man to do so in league history.
“Luka is on his way to win MVP some time in the future, very soon,” he said. "If you look at his numbers across the board and you look at how he was carrying our team, that's nothing short of an MVP.”
MVP? Wasn’t that always Irving, without us knowing? “I think he used his voice very well. You could tell he wanted to win and that’s all we need from Luka,” he said. “For us, it’s just continuing to feed him that energy that he can trust — and he can trust when the ball leaves his hands that other good things are going to happen. No matter if he scores a lot or not, our team is going to win. That’s where we’re putting our best foot forward. It’s just not on Luka, it’s on all of us.”
Maybe he fell off the face of the Earth. Maybe this is an alternate version of his life. I didn’t like the last Kyrie Irving. I like this one.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.