Icarus was only drifting
On Ja Morant's recent professional rifts, and how athletes fall from grace.
Results from googling “biggest falls from grace”:
Themistocles
Philippe Petain
O.J. Simpson
Mother Teresa
Satan
Ja Morant hasn’t played in seven consecutive games since the 2022-2023 season. If you can remember all that season’s details your memory is better than mine.
Carmelo Anthony retired, Paolo Banchero was drafted first overall, the Nuggets won the title. Bill Russell died, Robert Sarver was suspended, Mike Brown won coach of the year with the Kings.
Morant, in his fourth season, was averaging 26.2 points per game, 5.9 total rebounds (still his career best). Morant flashed a gun on his social media twice, was suspended eight games in March 2023 and 25 games into the following season. His suspensions, to then, totalled 33 games. After making some noise in the Western Conference Semi-Finals the season before, Memphis lost to the Lakers in the first round.
His latest suspension — one game for a reported locker room flare up with coach Tuomas Iisalo — came down on the eve of what would’ve been his 7th consecutive game.
What do we want out of our stars? What are the conditions they must maintain in order for us to hold them within that rarified space of grace?
That hold, for us, a mix of obliviousness, a suspension of disbelief, and a weird piety to the person in question built of admiration and a quality of the inexplicable. We want not to be able to conceive of them fully — that’s where the magic is.
For them, a balancing beam shot through contrition and grace. An awareness of us on the other side of awe’s two-way mirror but without ever making eye contact, lest they break the spell. We want them smashing records and the limits of movement, but we’d like for them to act surprised about it. Aw shucks, I wasn’t even keeping track.
Morant has just about used up our good graces, you can tell by the tenor shift of “He is Grizzlies basketball” to “Memphis could do with a clean slate.” Morant is also pushing at the limits of what sports, as a monolith, still has difficulty having its stars comprehend: their worth and impact, their own gravity. He — maybe — pushed a coach out, all stars get at least one of those. Where he went wrong was saying last season that he admired Iisalo’s directness, and this season suggesting that same directness is too much.
Stars, on course, don’t get to change their minds. A fall from grace doesn’t need to go definitively down to be precipitous.
Dalzell, South Carolina had a population of 3,175 at the time of the 2020 United States census. It’s one of those towns where the main road doesn’t get treated with any demarcation from the side streets running off it now and again. The land is flat. You could pull into Paul’s Diner or the Dollar General, or cross the highway that cuts through town the same way you could pull off onto the soft grass shoulder of someone’s front yard or a hay field, tire leaving a soft divot in the red dirt but otherwise feel no change in the ground underneath you. A sleepy town in the sense that you could doze off at the wheel and go cruising along unhurried and unbeknownst.
Long roads, that’s what Dalzell has in spades. A long road of a backyard where Ja Morant first practiced basketball with his dad, the polarizing Tee Morant, and a long road south to Sumter, where Morant went to high school. From there, a long snaking road off Oswego Highway to the school itself, a strip mall compound of low brick buildings blending into the fields surrounding it.
An hour drive from Dalzell to Columbia, Morant played AAU with the South Carolina Hornets and for one year alongside Zion Williamson. For most of it Morant was 5’9” and unranked, but all roads eventually go somewhere.
Morant was discovered in an overflow gym at a summer tournament by an assistant coach from Murray State. The coach left the main gym and the player he’d come to watch to buy a bag of chips. Hearing the thud of a ball and the staccato shouts of mid-game voices he ducked into a backup gym and found Morant in a 3-on-3 scrimmage. Morant was invited to participate in the main tournament the next day, and Murray State’s head coach drove from Georgia to Spartanburg, S.C. the day after. Morant became the school’s number one recruit.
All athletes participate in their own mythmaking, but the degree to which that lore is drawn up and then drawn upon eventually leaves their hands as sole creation. Morant didn’t set out to be the next central figure in “face of the league” arguments but every detail in his story — tiny American town, hoops in the backyard, undiscovered — chiseled that face into a form the limelight loved, clung to. How it glanced off him just right as he sprung to the rim, how he glowed up there. The same went for Zion Williamson, the pair of them drafted one and two first read as destiny, now annotated as cautionary tale.
The heft of that mantle (what it was, what it did) difficult to overstate. There were only two seasons where Morant and the young Grizzlies got to play to their age, free and fast under the radar. They accelerated, jumped their own developmental trajectory, because where else does a team go with its collective, restless foot ground down on the gas? A team and its rising star accustomed to roads that unfurl out in every direction without resistance, without, even, a low curb to clarify driveway from highway.
Morant was a marvel. Is still. But in his first few seasons he seemed to whip the breath of his opponents up around him as invisible padding as he lifted from them, head and shoulders above, feats of abstract limb and torqued body trailing the basketball like the flaring tail of a comet, the crashes back to earth just as spectacular, charmed.
It must feel awful, to have the bruting for your particular diamond in the rough be the opinion, the expectation, the pull and want from every person who’s watched you work since you were pulled from that auxiliary gym. A little chip here, a bashing there, hands all fumbling for a shard, a sliver of Morant’s particular light. Many will point to Morant’s father as architect of his son’s rise and many-plateaued descent, but we’ve all, in one clammy, grasping fist or another had a hand in it.
Long roads, Morant’s no stranger. The longest is always the one left to go.
Is Icarus, in his escape, closer?
The myth shape-shifts, like most do, and has come to symbolize excessive ambition, but Icarus was on a getaway flight. He and his father Daedalus on the lam from King Minos, furious that they’d revealed a way out of the Labyrinth to Theseus.
Daedalus warned Icarus not to swoop too low to the ocean so the feathers in his wings didn’t get waterlogged, and not to rise too high for fear the wax holding the feathers together melted. The lesson here, meted out over centuries, is to take the middle road.
But what about joy? Icarus was only drifting, after all, loose and light on updrafts with the adrenalin of fresh escape burning out from his belly. If in a moment he veered up, tilted his cheek to the warmth of the sun, shut his eyes, took a deep breath of air mingling salt, hot resin drifting from the stone pines and cypress crowding the shore, the musk of sheep on the nearby hills if we set the scene with Bruegel the Elder’s version, and forgot himself?
This feels less a fit of hubris than a pang of being deeply human.
Trace the lesson back further, before father and son leapt from the ledge of the tower they were locked in, and wonder if it isn’t a warning about talent. Daedalus, master craftsman, Pliny the Elder wrote that he invented carpentry and Pausanias, essentially an early Greek travel writer, attributed every wooden sculpture he came across to Daedalus without a second thought. In myth, where most of Daedalus’ handy-work lives, he invents to help people, but each invention works like a blighted domino.
When do gifts become dangerous? It was Daedalus who invented the Labyrinth, but first there was the hollow cow he made for Pasiphaë, Minos’ daughter, seeking a stay against Poseidon’s punishment for her father. From there came the Minotaur, the creature locked in the Labyrinth Minos sent Theseus to be devoured by. The wings that failed Icarus were next.
Is the lesson then not to squander gifts, or not to set your best intentions in another person’s hands? What Icarus lost sight of was not the middle road, but the fate he was bound to by birth — in a simplified way he was just another invention of his father. For a split second he shut his eyes against the constraints of his history, its past, a lineage of invention and its implied wisdom, and turned his face to the sun. Then, splash.
Seems cruel, all that for a moment in the sun.
You’ve come, have you? You’ve come, you source of tears to many mothers. It is long since I saw you; but as I see you now you are much more terrible, for I see you brandishing the downfall of my country.
— Eilmer of Malmesbury, the 11th century Benedictine monk who fashioned wings to fly and who, witnessing Halley’s Comet, was said to prophesize the Norman invasion of England.
We just tackled everything head on. We started to say, let’s just be brutally honest. What’s the worst thing that can happen? Somebody’s going to be upset for a few minutes, and we’re going to win more basketball games. But it’s such a human thing to avoid that, because of fear, because of What if they turn against you?
— Tuomas Iisalo, Grizzlies head coach, on his communication style.
There have been plenty of guesses to what’s going on with Morant, more with what will become of him. Whether Morant will bounce back from this, flourish in Iisalo’s churning system of play, or whether Iisalo has lost him and the Grizzlies trade away Morant, veer fully into the rebuild they opened the possibility of by trading Demond Bane for draft picks over the summer.
The most interesting detour from the usual advice of “man up” came from Jamal Crawford on NBA Showtime, just before Morant returned after his one game suspension.
Crawford said as young players, and he nodded to include Vince Carter and Carmelo Anthony standing opposite him on the studio floor, they studied everything about the stars above them, especially the ones in their locker rooms. They studied them so they could emulate and, eventually, become them. Carter and Carmelo murmured assent. Crawford wished Morant had that.
He switched perspectives from being a kid (a young player) to kids (fans, the ones watching the game and Morant). Like cross-cutting in a movie —bouncing between POVs — we’d left Crawford’s gaze as a rookie and were suddenly looking up at Morant.
“All those kids that look up to you, they’re watching everything,” Crawford said, noting that without kids an athlete can’t become a superstar. “Body language, how you handle situations — this could be a moment where he could teach a whole new generation how to handle things when it’s not comfortable.”
To stay within cinematic techniques, Crawford broke basketball’s fourth wall. Yes, to a degree he meant that kids buy things like signature shoes, but he pushed beyond the merch of it all to that invisible but rarely breached barrier that sports holds so dearly to, the one that demarcates it from “real life”.
It was such a light linking, the confirmation that actions by athletes slip the strict context of the game they’re playing in. The hope that this might be a moment to teach without being heavy-handed or chastising about it, without forcing Morant to bow his head into the moniker of role model. That he didn’t have to fall, or be made an example of, to be one.