Mandatory Credit: Tom Szczerbowski-USA TODAY Sports
Millionaire athletes are not people to be pitied, not in most contexts. Sure, professional basketball players deal with immense pressure and grueling schedules and are more or less replaceable parts with an expiration date. But they are paid handsomely for their athletic accomplishments, afforded fame and further opportunities for fortune because of their visibility as a public figure. In a list of people who deserve sympathy, they rank relatively low.
Using this mentality and applying it in broad strokes is problematic. The public is hyper-critical of pro athletes because they are treated like superior versions of ourselves, an extension of Americans generally. Not giving 100 percent or not living and breathing the game is perceived as an insult to Average Joes that would kill to roll out of bed and run a 4.4 40-yard-dash. When someone like Larry Sanders emerges and raises questions about whether they really want to play basketball for a living, people’s ears tend to perk up.
Sanders, a seven-foot behemoth that is less than two years removed from being a shot-blocking force, is reportedly apathetic to continuing his athletic career. A casual bystander would look at his situation and wonder what the problem is; getting paid $11 million to put a ball in a hoop and prevent others from doing the same is a pretty kushy gig. His career path happily coincides with his greatest physical asset — height.
Except Sanders doesn’t owe the public a basketball career because he happened to hit the genetic lottery. Careers aren’t necessitated by “natural fit”, rather a combination of a person’s willingness and aptitude in a given field. Perhaps the world would be better off if the best and brightest would all go into high impact fields and help push humanity forward, whether that’s medicine, quantum physics or engineering. There’s just no justification for civilized people to pigeonhole those around them based on pre-determined factors. Autonomy is what sets us apart from animals, who live and die (mostly) on a pre-set path.
From a wider view, the NBA looks a lot like classrooms I sat in through high school and college. There are people of all different archetypes; the average student that tries really hard, the genius who coasts by on natural gifts, the kid begging for extra credit at semester’s end. Sanders, like Andrew Bynum before him, seems like the guy who is in class because everyone else expected him to go. He’s not in the NBA for a sense of fulfillment or a thirsts for a greater athletic refinement — he’s finishing all his gen-eds and hoping a future will fall from the heavens.
People that are depressed get sympathy in droves, and rightfully so (even though it’s often not enough). But people wandering aimlessly through life are as sympathetic to me as those that don’t find it worth continuing. Even for someone that’s seven feet tall, astoundingly rich and physically taut, fulfillment’s goalposts are constantly moving. What would make one person or even millions of them happy could be a drop in the bucket for another, even people close to them. We idolize competitive warlords like Michael Jordan and don’t stop to consider that his approach to sport is not universally “correct”, just like Sanders’ apathy to his craft is not necessarily “wrong”. Unfortunate sure, but he’s far from alone in having a distaste for the job he backed into.
It’s fine to stop short of feeling bad for Larry Sanders. In fact, you’re as free to hate his guts as he is to ponder the merits of his profession. I simply ask you to consider that deep down his life may leave him feeling miniature, despite his towering above the average person.