Foot Locker Ad Raises the Question: What If Lonzo Ball Is Actually Funny?

It's strange to say about a player who has easily been the most talked-about in his draft class, but we really don't know Lonzo Ball very well yet. In a Father's Day–themed ad Foot Locker released today, though, Lonzo reveals a decent deadpan and an authentically funny wryness that has otherwise been drowned out by his father's relentless, troll-hard mugging. LaVar Ball's overbearing Sports Daddery is the ad's central joke, but LaVar is not the star of the ad. Lonzo Ball is. For all the basic pleasures of seeing him without his dad pulling faces in the background, the ad is fun because Lonzo is funny. He probably always has been. It's just been hard to hear him before. Anyway:

Life in this stupid and terrible current age forces all of us to be media critics, moment by moment. This is not just about the stuff that you learn to do without even knowing that you've learned to do it, like unconsciously tuning out omnipresent advertising or otherwise turning down the gain on the world's ceaseless ambient wheedling for your time and attention and patronage. Because the dominant rhetorical mode of our moment is trolling, and because trolling is in itself without purpose and morally null, it's important that we learn how to parse it. A graying generation of previously functional adults are acquiring mood disorders on Facebook because they don't know how to do this.

What makes trolling distinct and different from ordinary calculating dishonesty is that there isn't really a deeper purpose beyond it; it is there to be noticed and to elicit a response. It's not an attempt to start a conversation. Picture a beach ball being batted up into the air, over and over, forever. That, for all the other things about him that we do not and cannot know, is what LaVar Ball is doing.

This is not to say that Ball doesn't have some bigger plan for his children, because clearly the man has a great many plans for his children. But for the time being, while those children become whatever they will become, LaVar is happy to dominate the spotlight. Is he drawing attention away from them, so as to spare them some of the pressure that their talent (and, yes, his mugging and attempted profiteering) have brought? Is he just a helpless vanity case or a tumid macho dipshit? The answer is: do not think about this. LaVar Ball is exhausting in the ways that trolls are exhausting, impenetrable in the way that trolls are impenetrable, and doesn't really seem to have much to say besides. He is the least interesting person in this family, and while he is also probably the most famous right now, I will refer you to my earlier statement about the stupidity of this current moment.

The good news is that next year Lonzo Ball will be in the NBA, and we'll be able to watch and enjoy that, and if his single year at UCLA was any indication, it will be worth watching and easy to enjoy. His exhausting dad will surely stay getting all up in the videos, because he can do no other. But Lonzo Ball, NBA Basketball Player, will probably a more interesting character than the one we've been able to make out so far, and surely will be more fun to watch. At the very least, it should be less work to figure out.