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Sports

Meyers Leonard is Living the Tragedy of Sports' Insatiable Craving for More

Leonard, who once delighted in dunking over lesser men, has been reduced to being red and mad online.
Where has this man, this face, gone? Screen capture via YouTube/NBA

Below, you will find video of Portland Trail Blazers center Meyers Leonard doing off season drills. He catches a pass, he faces up his coach, he takes one or two dribbles, he dunks. Two moments in the lifetime of training that happens during an NBA offseason. His arms are bulging with muscles, he's red and sweating, giving his all to this repetitive, irritating task.

Meyers is in this gym, dunking around this tiny man, to get better. He's a professional basketball player who makes $10 million a year with Portland, sure, but he's still not good enough. One year he flexed an efficient scoring game, posting a 50/40/90 shooting under a thousand minutes played, flashing the kind of skills that made him seem like a dude with a future of really contributing in the NBA.

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But… that didn't happen. Instead, Meyers wilted under the pressure of more minutes, turning in a pair of terrible seasons, one worse than the next. Portland, generally a forgiving city, turned on him, complained about his (fairly modest, all things considered) salary, crowded the internet and the streets with complaints and hemming and hawing, crying "TRADE MEYERS" into whatever Heavens might listen.

It got worse when Nurk arrived. Jusuf Nurkic, a Bosnian big man rescued off of Denver's scrap heap—Portland received a first-rounder when they traded Mason Plumlee and a second round pick for him—was everything that Meyers wasn't. Meyers tends to float around the three point line on offense: Nurk sets a nasty, semi-legal pick and dives as deep as he can. Meyers is a miserable rebounder whose giant, 7"1' frame and apparent athleticism just never gets channeled into proper box out form: Nurk boards like a fucking sentient octopus. Meyers moves slowly, is almost fundamentally clumsy, and finds himself habitually out of position on defense: Nurk, for all his beef, carries himself with an understated grace and flips the ball in with a surprisingly deft touch.

Seeing, for the first time, what the Blazers had been missing, all those years, sent an already irritable fanbase into fits about Meyers. There is, in the mind of the Portlander, no more ship-outtable player, no worse contract, no more vile sign of malfeasance on the part of the gray-coiffed General Manager Neil Olshey.

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And so, in the shadow of all this, we watch Meyers spending his summer in a gym again, doing the same asinine drill over and over, face up two dribbles and a dunk, face up two dribbles and a dunk, face up two dribbles and a dunk. On and on and on and on. It is, in its way, amazing. He is a giant human and a marvelous athlete, slamming the ball down so it rattles the very foundation of the gym. If I could do this, even once, I would probably give up like…two months of my life.

And so, Meyers, I gotta ask: why so glum? Reader, I implore you to look at that mug.

It's tired. It's sad. It's bored.

It wonders, itself, how things got this dull, how the act of dunking, which provided Meyers with so much joy for so much of his life, has degraded into the rote task it is now, over and over, trying to satisfy this trainer so he can satisfy his coach so he can satisfy the thirsty masses so he can satisfy the rest of the NBA, so he can keep making lots of money.

It wasn't always like this:

Here's Meyers dunking on some Celtics chumps. He's so thrilled. He struts back on defense, flexes, and mean mugs anyone who will look upon his face. And please, Look upon that face, the same one that, in a few short years, would come to see dunking as a misery and a drudgery:

screen capture via Youtube/NBA

That happiness is not there for Meyers, now. The quality of being a superhuman athlete means less and less as you spend more and more time with other superhuman athletes. Where, once, you could find joy in that stupid dunk, there is none there anymore. Meyers was the youthful experimenter, once, a box of potential playing on that court one day at a time. But now, as age comes and the stakes raise and the expectations haunt you wherever you go, the joy goes away, satisfaction becomes a more and more slippery fish to grab.

In Meyers's frowning red mug, slamming that ball into the rim, we see the ultimate tragedy of sports: it is, truly, never enough. You get one big contract, you start playing for the next one. Win the title, you and everyone around you just want to win another one. Find a nice role on a good team, the gnawing voice inside tells you you could do more. Get drafted into the NBA, you have to subject yourself to obsessive, life consuming practice just to stay in the league. There's always another fucking thing that's expected from you, that you expect from yourself. It is, simply, the essence of craving, a whole way of life structured around denying the path to true happiness that Siddhārtha laid out in India, all those years ago.

It is a nightmare, and one that Meyers Leonard appears to be living to its fullest extent. I hope he can find a way to break himself of his suffering, preferably on a team I don't root for.