Kevin Durant Is Cutting Through Everyone's Bullshit

Honesty tours from famous folks should always be examined skeptically. When someone who has spent years with a PR professional's arm up his butt announces in so many words that he is making his own decisions now, optics be damned, it's permissible to squint a bit and maybe toss an oh, for sure man in the general direction of what is more likely to be a rebranding than a sudden rejection of any and all media cynicism. After all, there are literally cologne ads where this sort of thing happens. Trust no one who makes millions off their image.

With that said, Kevin Durant's actually, you know what? fuck you guys swerve feels more genuine than not. An athlete bobbing in a pond of tape recorders is always a game of Does He Actually Believe That?, but Durant's recent anti-platitudes don't seem cribbed from the minds of Wieden+Kennedy employees. If they're unconventional ad copy, they're exquisitely believable—sloppy and contradictory and ugly in the way slogans are not.

I will use my expertise in human being-dom here. Human beings lash out, then express regret while also explaining why they weren't totally wrong to fly off the handle in the first place. Human beings hate stuff for petty and not altogether sensical reasons. Human beings are a particular way for a time, because everyone tells them that that's the way to be, then they realize they don't want to be that way anymore, and shit gets messy as they try to figure out how they want to live, what they want for themselves. We do a lot of things, but there are certains things we do that are quintessentially human. Those are a few, and over the past week, Kevin Durant has been doing all of them, in public, not unselfconsciously, but without crippling concern for how it might seem to other people.

Durant is angry. He is angry with the media for repeatedly asking him questions about the deficiencies of his teammates and his coach, with fans who see that he might leave Oklahoma City in a couple years and wonder aloud if he would be so disloyal, with the meme-ification of what started out as an expression of love. These are variably valid things to be angry about, but it's peculiar that Durant has admitted as much, that he has brought it up.

We've decided, as a culture, that being angry is shameful. When I snap at my girlfriend, I apologize by saying I am "on edge" or "upset." This is a way, not of not being angry, but of not having to utter the word. I feel like if I use it, I am admitting to being a thing no one wants to be. Athletes, because they are marketed to us as much better versions of ourselves, are never angry. They are driven, or passionate, or fiery. Michael Jordan punched his teammates in practice and was not angry. His competitiveness got the best of him, or something.

Durant's personal candor cuts through that bullshit. He is copping to experiencing all manner of emotions, vile ones included. "When I'm on the court, I'm a total asshole. I'm a dick," he says. He can be that way off it, too: "I just don't like other teams or other players. I can't sit there [and watch another player's game]. I feel like I'm supporting them by watching it. I hope you have a bad game. Because I'm such a hater!" If this is not perfectly acceptable, it is understandable. What we feel is sometimes profane.

When we talk about wanting athletes to be "real people," we are talking about them bearing their humanity to us, because it's there, in full, whether they permit us to see it or not. It's not news that Kevin Durant is flawed, but the extent to which he is sharing those flaws with us is extraordinary. He is driven, and passionate, and fiery. He also possesses wretched traits—ones that could easily be spun by someone with a thesaurus and an agenda into the kind of foibles we allow our godded-up ballplayers to have. His competitiveness can get the best of him, you could say. But Durant wouldn't. He is a thing no one wants to be sometimes. He's a human being.