Read the room, then leave it if you have to
The last time I did anything close to what I’d call flipping out at work was when I got a shard of metal lodged in my eye.
I’d left work early when it happened to go to an emergency ophthalmologist, where I was told the thing in my eye was metal, and on leaving wrote to the relevant people at work to tell them what had happened and to ask, was it safe for everyone else? Because it had happened just being in the building of my work, a building that wasn’t supposed to have metal getting flung around at speeds where it could lodge into your eye, into anything.
By the time I got in the next morning I still hadn’t heard anything. The first person I saw, who had been on my email, was making toast in the office kitchen. I asked them if they’d got my note.
Oh yeah, they said, how’s your eye?
Never did I think an “Oh yeah” would be capable of burning me up so quick, but there was the added, casual way they were spreading peanut butter on toast, not bothering to look up as they asked.
I think I said something like, Not great, there’s metal lodged in it. And while I think I said it pretty neutrally, there’s a glint that can come with flatness, stillness, especially when people are used to someone, like they are with me, being animated. I asked if they’d had a chance to look into where the metal might have come from, and was it something to be concerned about for everyone else who worked there, or report to the Ministry of Labour? I definitely became a “as per my email” person in that moment but mostly because mentally keeping to the outline of my actual email was helping me stay composed.
They stopped spreading their peanut butter and sort of hit the knife down against the plate.
I just got here, what do you want me to do? They said.
I mean, there’s a lot, in a moment like that, that you want from somebody. You want them to not treat a disruption to making toast like a confrontation. You want them to acknowledge how fucking wild it was, what happened, to look at you—you want them to look at you, too—and be able to gauge, can we make a small joke here, together, to lighten things? You want them to ask you if you are, overall, alright. You also want them to acknowledge, as per the email that they did obviously read, that something happened. Just that it did.
That’s where I would say I flipped a bit, when I responded and said, “I’d like you to acknowledge that something happened, and that you will look into it.”
And that really isn’t even flipping. Retrospectively, I wish I had flipped a little harder. Had not raised my voice or gotten mad but just questioned the lack of urgency in that strange exchange. And I am not for people flipping at work. I think it’s a little bit unhinged and inconsiderate of other people around, and that most things should be taken to another location with just the people involved and probably with a long walk or a breather in between. Another colleague was there during the toast situation that morning and I apologized to them after, if I’d made them uncomfortable. To which they, the first person in that whole ordeal, were the first to make me not feel crazy when they said, Are you kidding? I would be losing my mind if no one had gotten back to me, or if I had to be the one to first bring it up!
All to say, if Kevin Love is frustrated about work, I get it.
There is a line with complaining, though. I mean, sometimes letting off a little steam via a decent vent sesh is really all you need. You take it to a second location, you head home, you call someone as soon as you leave the office/basketball court to be like, Get a load of this. You talk yourself through it, out of it. You get some distance and some sleep and things feel more manageable.
Occasionally, if you are complaining too much about something—work, relationships, habits, yourself—there needs to be another point of action involved. A decision has to be made. You look at the situation and you are, hopefully, honest with yourself (or else you will be back there again sooner than later) and you make some kind of adjustment. A change. A step in another direction.
But Kevin Love slapping chairs courtside, I don’t get.
Yes, I know, athletes at this level are under different kinds of pressure, and stress, bodily and mentally, than I am at my job. Absolutely this is true on the court. And losing games, badly, or when games are close, sucks. I’ve been in uncomfortable locker rooms where I want to talk to a guy whose team just lost very badly, who is maybe verbally having an outburst or just emitting some very strong, “I definitely don’t want to answer your questions about my job right now” energy, coming off them like sonic vibrations. But you know what? I am at work too. I am doing a job. To every player’s credit thus far, they have taken a breath and talked. Some very succinctly, others with surprising floridity and grace given the things coming out of their mouths seconds before. Because they’re pros. They know that part is a part of their job as much as the part where their bodies are doing impossible things, night after night.
What Kevin Love is up to now I’m not sure. Playing in Cleveland, at this moment, certainly sucks. He’s coming off an unexpected surgery. His $120 million season didn’t start the way he wanted it to from a summer of a dozen summer vacations, each more wonderful looking than the last. Jordan Clarkson, someone who Love appeared to very much enjoy playing with, got traded, team chemistry could be off, and then there are young guys who are hungry, who are probably also frustrated, looking to try and make something happen. To not have a write-off year because it’s their careers, too.
Love, like it or not, is the vet on that team. Veteran players are very free, in my eyes, to have the same kind of frustrations their younger or more inexperienced teammates do, they are playing the same game, but the difference is the distance they have under their belts. If you told me vets can’t have positive nights of flipping out I’d tell you, gently, simply: Kyle Lowry. They can also lead with the kind of panoramic pacifism of Mike Conley, a gentleness that will knock you on your ass. There are lots of ways to corral bad days into great nights, or bad halves of nights into second half stellar ones, and veteran players have an intuitive understanding when it comes to reading sea-changes in a game, knowing what you need to run with or run right at.
Wanting to be there is a factor, for Love, who I’m sure does not any longer. To Love’s credit, I think he’d be of better use to a lot of other teams with more cohesive plans when it comes to their franchises futures than whatever the Cavs are trying to cook up. But the Cavs gave him that contract—a huge one made even more hobbling to Love if it looks like he’s going to drag a team down he doesn’t jibe with for a minute—they had to mean it, in some way, as proof of what they wanted to build around him. If Love wanted to, and maybe he did when he signed, he could have closed out in Cleveland. Or done 4 decent years on that contract and taken minimum somewhere that needed his experience and a handful of minutes every game or two.
Like complaining, there is a line with player autonomy, but mostly because as a concept it is still fairly new and not available to every non-LeBron type player. If Love is exercising his by slapping chairs, by daring Koby Altman to fine him, I just don’t see the kind of autonomy it is going to influence that isn’t tinged by anxiety, or hostility, trepidation or unease. As a vet he also has a hand in how autonomy, as a practice in the league, is going to shape up and it’s precisely because he isn’t a LeBron type. There are tiers to what you can ask for, in any situation, and Love is going to carve those out for future players in supporting roles. Players who bring a kind of benevolence and prudence, over sophistication, to energy and gameplay.
If Love is looking at a shitty season in Cleveland, rather than the recent string of outbursts, he also has the easier option of riding it out. And I don’t mean coast. I mean look at the gaps in the team, where communication is breaking down, and try to address it. He was doing fine, it seemed like, until now. He was giving really long, thoughtful hugs and whispered words to Pascal Siakam after the Raptors tore the Cavs up mid-December. He was hugely fond of Ja Morant for not posterizing him with a dunk to shatter physical relativity. If he really does have a problem with Collin Sexton, it isn’t necessarily his job to sort it out, but he can probably do better than stomping up to him on court and clapping, hugely, in his face. Rather than looking at the year as a scope that can only aim to the postseason, play for consistency. I can’t believe I’m writing this, but the Cavs aren’t that bad. They have good, engaged new pieces, players who are finding their feet like Larry Nance Jr. and Cedi Osman and other dweebs who I cannot rightly name out of respect to myself, but honestly they should not be oscillating as wildly as they are when it comes to a regular season record! Love being in the mix is all more reason to think that someone—definitely him—should put their hands firmly at 10 and 2 and concentrate on keeping it between the lines until April. Who knows, maybe a mid-season trade comes through, or the handful of teams middling out in the East really stall, it’s a long season and a lot more can and will happen and once it does, when it’s over, you can let the wheels fall off.
Everybody is entitled to bad days but if you can help it, you should never be the passive-aggressive peanut butter spreader to the metal jammed in someone else’s iris, or the person slapping a chair beside the in-game towel person just trying to do their job, and never the person who posts a picture of the capital-C Cinema Joker and captions it “Mood.”
Read the room, then leave it if you have to.