Troublesome Momus

Rudy Gobert as the god of mockery, and our uneasy mirror.

At first, it’s hard to see Rudy Gobert. He’s just come loping back in transition and has only made it to half-court when Klay Thompson and Jaden McDaniels get tangled up. The snare between Thompson and McDaniels is the kind that gets goofier as it goes on, where two men refuse to let go of the other and go careening down the court like tripping dancers spun out from the group in a movie adaptation of a Jane Austin novel. Arms loop around ribs, elbows lock to trap them there, hands wrap around wrists and the faster they spin the more gravity suctions them. When McDaniels finally forces the two of them to a halt it’s by grabbing Thompson’s jersey and shaking him from the shoulders. Forcing him close one last time then snapping him away.

That’s when Gobert comes in.

Maybe, if he wrapped his arms instead around McDaniels. Maybe if he waited. And isn’t that the lament of Rudy Gobert? If he had only waited. Wrong place, wrong time, for an NBA lifetime.

Draymond Green snaps to Gobert’s back like he’s dreamed this. Like his subconscious knows the contours of Gobert’s shoulders and neck, has seen his scapulae in dreams. Green slides around Gobert’s body before Gobert realizes he’s latched on — one second his legs are straight and the next he’s been made to sit in an invisible chair. It looks effortless, but there’s a photo that was taken just as Green has gotten around behind Gobert, is in the process of dragging him down. Green’s teeth — perfectly aligned — clamped in a grimace as his hands work to find each other across a nook of Gobert’s body. Green is slowing them both, presumably stopping them both from falling backwards, but the grimace to me is less from pain than resolve. Green, though intimately aware of Gobert’s body tight against his, tightening even, is also at that arm’s length part in a thought process gone infrared. There’s the heat immediately under his right arm of Gobert’s chest, Gobert’s pulse against Green’s hands locked under the notch of Gobert’s Adam’s apple, glowing red, and then there’s the rest of the people around him transformed into blobs of orange and yellow. Steve Kerr’s protest, when he finally gets there, registering a bucolic green.

Green’s dragged Gobert down the other half of the court by the time they’re wrenched apart. Watching the broadcast, the eye follows the crowd of coaches, officials and Timberwolves as it stops under the basket before you realize Gobert’s no longer with them. He’s sitting just outside the key, like a character cleared from a cartoon cyclone fight sequence, or dropped from the trapdoor of a wagon.

In the locker room after the game (this all happening within two minutes of tip-off is what’s most bizarre), Gobert is neat. Black t-shirt, clean fade. I’m not sure why I expected disheveled. His rebuttal is clean, too, or starts that way. He takes a deep breath when asked what he thought when he saw the video of the sequence. He calls it clown behaviour. He says Green doesn’t “even deserve me putting my hands on him”. He calls it clown behaviour again, then a third time. In the moment, it’s not a deflection, but it’s hard not to find a tinge of reversal in it. A low-frequency revelling. To offload the title that has, warranted or not, so often slipped around Gobert’s shoulders with the same ferocious glee as Green did.

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The times I feel most like Rudy Gobert: When I’ve excelled at something and the sheer, solitary pleasure is not enough. When I ask for attention and feel immediately uncomfortable with the result.

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We’re going to play Clue, Rachel texts. I have $71 worth of cannolis balanced between my legs on the bus. Is this a dumb dessert for children? Half the cones are lined in chocolate but, they’re not really sweet. The guy who put them all together slowly, carefully for me at Eataly didn’t hear me ask if half a dozen could get dipped in chocolate chips and even then, semi-sweet. The loss is negligible. Dylan is bringing them two bottles of Prime — just the Gatorade style drink, the energy drink version isn’t available in Canada — as a joke. Rachel said all the older kids in their school are obsessed with them, so the younger kids have fallen to thrall.

In the way of the city and like we always have, Rachel’s new house is not far from mine, but also not what you’d call close. Walking from the bus stop with all my cannolis I catch the filling moon flashing silver between the bare skeleton branches of trees. It hit me the day before, driving through Rosedale Valley, that was it — the leaves are done. Always a shock that it’ll be like this now for six months.

The streetlights are just turning on as I cut up the street. I rubberneck an old parked pickup truck to the point where I nearly trip. A lot of the porches have Christmas trees twinkling with lights set out on them, like a hyper-localized tradition. I climb the steps up to the porch and feel warmth from the other side of the new front door.

Later, after Clue and my character getting away with murder, after drawing Bart Simpson heads on cats, raccoons, deer and a donut, after dinner and the kind of frenetic catching up that goes out in all directions, the kids make a game of leaving out the back door and running around to knock on the front. Hopped up on Prime and cannolis, costumed in layers of white, red and green clothing over their pajamas, they play at being carollers. First, they sing Wham’s ‘Last Christmas’, then Rudolph. The next round, after running back inside breathless and shedding the costumes in the back room asking us what happened, they write us each thoughtful notes on scraps of paper. The gift inside you is way better than under wrapping paper, mine says. The notes and the visits get more frantic. Scraps of paper that say NOW PRIME PRIME PRIME and E.T. Drinking PRIME get slapped down on the dining table before they run back into the night. Dylan and Richard take turn answering the door over the last few feral visits as Rach and I talk in the kitchen.

As we pull on our coats they fall soft, tired but still vibrating, over Rachel. In the way that kids are adept at they parrot jokes at us that are too weird and funny to ignore but still seem at our expense, flipping from entertainer to entertained so fast. The 4th wall of their fun only gets broken when Rach tells them she’s known us all longer than she’s known them. They go quiet, briefly, with the impossibility, before starting up again. Their laughter follows us out the door, making a joke and taking one with us.

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The times I feel most like Rudy Gobert: When I’m feeling sorry for myself, when I attempt to make light of something and the people I’m talking to stare back uncomprehendingly, if a little strained. When I feel worlds out of step with the people I love.

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Momus, Ancient Greek personification of mockery and satire, ultimately expelled from Mount Olympus because of how harshly he criticized the other gods. He told Prometheus his proudest creation, people, were flawed because he hadn’t placed a door in their chest to give easy access to their thoughts. He told Poseidon that perfect white bull he’d sent Minos could’ve been made better if he’d given it eyes at the tips of its horns, to gore more precisely.

He couldn’t help it, it was lamentably his only nature. His twin, Oizys, misery goddess, personification of pain and distress, apt for how often the two are twined together. Criticism and its sting.

As time passed, from Aesop’s fables to 17th-century English poets, representations of Momus softened, going from god to fool. In card games that were early iterations of Tarot decks, Momus was the jester.

I think of Gobert in that fated presser. First, pantomiming touching all the mics and recorders laid on the table in front of him, then standing and making a point to come back and actually do it. He seems to sense that what he’s done rests on the very nervous edge of collective consciousness, otherwise I don’t think he would’ve literally run from the room. I think, too, of Gobert choking up when he didn’t get picked for the All-Star team (and Green, another towering and flawed figure in the NBA’s Mount Olympus, waiting in the wings to call him on it).

There’s Gobert as capable anchor for a duo that didn’t ever quite get there in Utah. Him and Donovan Mitchell in repetition first thrilling, then capable, finally grating, as habits in the NBA tend to wear. There’s Gobert as jettisoned thorn in the Jazz’s — and ostensibly Mitchell’s — psyche. We now know it was more of a test case, the franchise seeing what one star would yield so they’d know when the time was right to offer up the other. There’s Gobert as very high-profile experiment for Minnesota, the franchise’s version of playing chicken until it realized there was no one, no rival force, coming the other way and daring them to move (that foot is still down on the gas — the Wolves are presently hovering over .700).

The frustration of Gobert is that he can never help himself. Like Momus, Gobert’s nature, at least in basketball, has been to point out the faults. He’s a 3x Defensive Player of the year, but he looks clumsy. He’s not what you’d call a stoic big, he doesn’t necessarily make it look easy. There’s a direct correlation between effort and talent in NBA fandom, the preference being for talent to eclipse effort. Our eyes get used to streamlined skill, snag on what’s arduous, demanding, anything that seems too laboured. When he cries in plain sight, overcome with falling short of what he wanted (and isn’t that the driver in sports, to want something so badly it consumes?), it’s such a startling deviation from clamped-down script that the main reaction is discomfort. For some, being made to feel uncomfortable is enough of a provocation for dislike, for others, they might question the reaction, its authenticity, having so few public points of comparison for it.

Trace the word satire back far enough and you get a literal translation of “a full dish of various kinds of fruits". As a word, and exercise, it’s meant to probe, expand outward. Criticism, too, rarely has just one impetus. You can mean well and deliver too sharply, rushed or self-conscious in what you’re trying to say. Sports wants a singularity — one winner (and loser) in all things.

Maybe the most Gobert has in common with Momus is that in their actions, they offer mirrors. Like the gods who booted Momus from Olympus, whether we’re prepared to look into the mirror and consider the reflection has nothing to do with who offered. We’re always ready to find something wrong with the refection.