LaVar Ball Is Exactly the Pickup Player You Thought He Was

People have opinions about LaVar Ball, which sets him apart from the parents of just about every other star player in college basketball and surely is at least part of the reason why he acts the way he does. You are by now familiar with how LaVar Ball acts, which is basically like someone who, in every waking moment, is on First Take and in the middle of a heated semi-argument with Stephen A. Smith. It seems safe to assume that LaVar is also like this at Jack in the Box, or at the dentist's office, or in quiet moments at home with loved ones.

There is a mystery, however, at the heart of LaVar Ball's public persona. We know that he played college basketball for one season at Washington State, where he put up unremarkable statistics and is better remembered for his big personality than anything basketball-related. We know, too, that LaVar Ball claims to believe that in his heyday, he could have defeated Michael Jordan one-on-one. His Washington State teammates remember him as brash and strong, in that order; his Division II coach at Cal State-Los Angeles, where Ball was an all-conference star after leaving Washington State, remembers him as good.

But for all the footage there is and will be of LaVar Ball holding forth on basketball and basketball-adjacent topics, there is precious little video of LaVar Ball actually playing basketball. That changed on Sunday when a YouTube Channel called The Hoops Column released footage of Ball playing in a rec league game in Chino Hills, California.

It does not disappoint, both in its Zapruder-ish production values and in how it illustrates the way Ball's personality manifests on the court. The first thing you notice about Ball—he's No. 8 in red—is the Vince Wilfork-esque width and depth of his torso; he is a very big dude. The next thing you will notice, and will keep noticing, is that his game is a perfect and precise reflection of his public persona. He is more reactive with his body language than he is active on defense—he is honestly not very active on defense—but the dude is a presence. And while Ball suffers some of the indignities of being a man in his late 40s playing in a rec league game, from butterfingering a couple duffed rebounds to getting packed under the rim on a layup attempt, it's also clear that none of that registers as such. He absolutely plays like someone who believes he could have beaten Michael Jordan head up. He throws an unremarkable cross-court pass and adds a gratuitous no-look head-whap to it. He cherry-picks shamelessly. He maybe possibly attempts to throw an alley-oop to himself and then rockets into the wall like he was wearing malfunctioning roller skates.

Was LaVar Ball trying to throw an alley-oop to himself here? — Dime on UPROXX (@DimeUPROXX)March 27, 2017

Ball is a weird pick-up player, in short, but also a very particular kind of weird pick-up player. Playing basketball against strangers is a great way to be exposed to the weird multiplicity of humanity, or at least the part of humanity that's into playing basketball against strangers. If you have played much of this kind of basketball, you have played with someone like LaVar Ball—a big dude who is maybe skilled or maybe not, but who plays with the low-intensity/high-confidence vibe of Shaquille O'Neal circa his Cleveland Cavaliers or Boston Celtics years. More often than you would think, when you encounter him in a pickup game, this man is somehow wearing boots, or jeans, or both; in this case he's No. 8, in red. This man will demand the ball. This man believes, at a level that cannot and will not be disrupted by any of the evidence around him—evidence he creates himself!—that he is the best player on the floor. This man is sure that he's a star.

This unshakeable and non-negotiable confidence is a big part of what the people who don't like LaVar Ball dislike about him, and also a big part of why he makes for such entertaining (if one-note) television. Ball is argumentative and proud and sure of himself and also sure of many other things in the way that TV Sports People are, and it works well, as far as it goes. Ball is a role player in the doofy discourse of TV sports, and an effective one, but he is effective and entertaining precisely because he believes himself to be a star. Because of this, we can assume that sports television will continue to be LaVar Ball's barbershop for, well, it's hard to say when it's going to stop, actually. Given that two more of Ball's sons are going to be playing at UCLA, and given that Ball is still so compellingly weird, we'll likely have plenty of time to keep figuring it out.