There’s a strange sense of foreboding, a horrible inevitability that this – lying face down on the court, almost frozen in a moment of absurd, abject failure – will be the defining moment of the Austin Rivers’ professional life.
To set the stage, the Los Angeles Clippers are hosting Game 2 of the Western Conference semifinals against the Houston Rockets, their surefire first ballot Hall of Fame point guard glowering on the bench in his civvies, once again shelved after gutting out an incredible, career-defining performance to knock off the San Antonio Spurs.
With a wafer thin-bench, Austin’s father-slash-head coach, Doc Rivers, had little choice but to give his kid the keys to the car. (More on this in a moment.) Los Angeles spent the bulk of the game running the offense through Blake Griffin, because, let’s face it, Austin Rivers is not a point guard. Still, he’d chipped in 10 points and on the strength of a 10-2 run, the Clippers only trailed by four with 43 seconds remaining.
Corey Brewer launched an off-balance, wrong-footed airball, and Rivers found himself with the ball in his hands, streaking upcourt, trying to cross over Corey Brewer. Then this happened:
There’s a lot to laugh at here, to be sure, and Kevin Harlan’s WWE-ish howl, “Here comes Austin Rivers!” was almost too perfect a straight line for the slapstick comedy that ensued. I’ll admit it. In the moment, I too was among the madding crowd pointing and giggling, firing off zingers on Twitter and sharing the above snippet like a fiend.
Yes, there’s always a mean-spirited brand of pleasure to be had in seeing a pro athlete looking as if any and all ability to control his fine and gross motor skills had suddenly vanished, and reduced to a particularly inept, clumsy toddler.
But Rivers’ faceplants tend to inspire a particular brand of schadenfreude, if only because the consensus is that he’s a fringe NBA talent (at best), and that the sole reason he’s still in the league is because Doc Rivers had saved his about-to-be-cut ass, dealing a pu pu platter of backups to his ex-bosses in Boston.
They’ve both done everything in their power to dispel the notion that there was any consideration given to his last name in making the deal, but all the protestations only served to reinforce the idea that this was nepotism at it’s worst; the equivalent of a rich father offering to donate a new building to a tony prep school to rescue his no-good, malingering, spoiled son from imminent expulsion.
Sadly, even a relatively tame comment by Doc about how he’d prep Austin for the rigors of the playoffs, “you’ve just gotta do your homework and be prepared,” has to be punctuated with, “I tell all our guys that,” one, to hopefully kneecap the easy jokes about a father ragging on his kid about keeping up on his studies, and two, to once again wage an unwinnable battle against the perception that sonny boy is receiving a boatload of preferential treatment.
Nobody likes that kid. No one roots for the living, breathing evidence that we’re all trying to beat the house at a rigged game.
Granted, there’s already a terrible burden to being a coach’s son. The stereotype is patently unlikable: a gym rat with shoes that are always polished, arriving on time, answering any and all adults straight in the eye with an unerringly polite “Yes Sir” and “No Sir” – the straight A student that is unerringly held up as an example of the good, moral life that can only be achieved by following the capital-r Rules of sports and complete acquiescence to authority.
But Rivers doesn’t even get to reap the rewards of a being a spit-shined little suck-up that’s gotten a lifetime of both familial instruction in the game and his dad’s DNA. Despite a decent handle and reasonably quick first step, he lacks the athleticism to convert at the rim, and never has had anything resembling a capable jumper. As a result, his game always scans as if he’s flailing, desperate to prove ... something. Even his teammates have taken notice. Check out Blake Griffin’s imitation of his signature (as it were) floater and the twitchy arrogance that accompanies it.
That’s when I stopped laughing, if only because it felt so frighteningly familiar.
For most of us, our fathers and mothers are our first coaches, even if we don’t get past grade-school level competitive ball. Mine certainly was. I was and forever shall be a terrible ballplayer, but that didn’t stop me from begging my dad to launch untold thousands of fly balls into the air, acceding to all of my demands for instruction and tutoring, in the hope that hours and hours of practice might get me to the point where I’d be passable.
We’d play until the dusk made the ball nigh invisible, but I refused to leave until we’d ended on a high note. I had to make one last great play just so I could cram that tiny morsel of time in into a fictional bases-loaded, two-outs, me-patrolling-centerfield-for-the-Mets scenario, making a running, tumbling, diving catch that’d live forever in glossy magazines and highlight reels.
What exactly it was I wanted to accomplish, I don’t even know. But I do know that these sweaty, thrashing and futile attempts at imagined greatness were driven not just by the nagging sensation that being a shitty ballplayer meant I wasn’t a real man. They were driven by a deep-seated and profound, if unnamed desire to please him, to impress him, and to make him proud.
Seeing Rivers lying there, his grand failure being held up for derision by the entire basketball-watching world, I couldn’t help but think that in that moment of stillness he, like I did in all of those frantic backyard games of catch, desperately wanted a do-over, both for himself and for the man that changed his diapers clutching a clipboard.
There’s absolutely nothing fun about watching an individual trapped by a narrative, especially as no-win and patently un-fun a storyline as this one. So I’m hoping against hope that Wednesday’s stumbling, fumbling turnover isn’t the defining moment for Austin. Maybe able to bang home a few janky, awkward shots at a clutch moment, and that Chris Paul makes it back for game three, if only to decrease the Clippers’ dependence on his performance – anything but more images of Doc screaming at him running on a loop in his mind over and over and over again.
