Debunking the L Words in Sports

What in the world do Loyalty and Legacy have to do with Kevin Durant and Dwyane Wade anyway?

The story of the 2016 NBA offseason has been change. Change is hard. Four players that defined an entire franchise each will not be back next year. Kobe Bryant and Tim Duncan have retired. Kevin Durant will wear Warriors blue and gold. Dwyane Wade returns home to Chicago. It will be awfully strange watching Lakers, Spurs, Thunder, and Heat games next year.

Throughout all the change, the focus has been on two L words that so often come up in sports — loyalty and legacy. Is this star player staying loyal to his team, to his jersey, to his town, to his calling as a player? And what is he doing for his legacy, for how he will be remembered for the rest of history?

So why are the ideas of loyalty and legacy so pervasive — and why is the conversation so very exhausting?

We love to wax poetic about loyalty in sports.

We expect fans to be loyal. Oh you’re a Warriors fan? New to the NBA I guess, did you just start in the last few weeks? It’s only acceptable to be a Ws fan if your father and your father’s father are actually from East Bay and moved there back in the Gold Rush and you’ve been through all the ups and downs and been loyal all the way. Fandom is through the good and the bad.

But fans are not always loyal. Fans burn jerseys when their favorite player disappoints. Fans give up on teams and choose someone else to follow. Fans turn off the game when it gets ugly and quit on the season when it’s going nowhere.

GMs aren’t always loyal to players either. They’re loyal to players just as long as they are talented and on a cheap contract and healthy and falling in line, and the minute they’re not any of those things, your GM will ship your favorite player right out the door. Their job is to build a winner, not a team you like. Winning is ruthless — it has to be.

Owners aren’t exactly loyal to their teams either. You’d think Oklahoma City fans, of all NBA folks, would know that one.

It shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that players themselves can also be disloyal. Sometimes, it turns out, they choose to leave for a job they like better, with better coworkers or a better boss, or one with better facilities or better weather or pay. Imagine that!

And what exactly are players supposed to be loyal to? They never chose to play for your team in the first place — they were drafted there. You know, drafted, the same word we use when we force young people into military service? We basically auction off our top athletes to the worst teams in the league and then get mad 5 or 10 years later when they have proven their value and, for the first time in their life, get to pick their preferred workplace.

The weirdest thing about loyalty in sports is that it doesn’t actually exist.

Legacy is a strange thing too.

Webster defines “legacy” as “something that happened in the past or that comes from someone in the past.” Legacy is the way we look back on a player or a team when all is said and done. It’s about a thing that happened and is over, and how we feel about it now.

So why are we so obsessed with figuring out every player’s legacy in real time?

Everything an athlete does affects their legacy these days. Did they sign the right endorsement? Did they pick the right college? Did they stay too long or leave too early? Were they loyal? Did they win enough? Were they a good teammate? Did they have killer instinct?

Notice how every single one of those questions is subjective. There’s no clear right or wrong answer. You get to ask the questions, and you get to pick the right answers too. You — you!! — get to define an athlete’s legacy.

And that’s the crazy thing really. At the end of the day, “legacy” is just a BS word we use to debate athletes and rank them and give #hottakes.

Of course the worst part is that all of us have different subjective answers. My choice for superstar may be a cutthroat athlete who stops at nothing — whether changing teams, alienating teammates, or abandoning family to late nights alone in the gym — to be a winner. Yours might be the humble athlete that works hard, stays loyal, contributes to the community, and does their very best for your team even if you never win it all. And neither of us is wrong.

The worst legacy argument of them all is RINGZ.

Win a ring, or be defined as a loser forever. Only that last win matters, so you better get it at all costs — as long as that cost isn’t something I dislike.

The RINGZ legacy is such a double standard. We want our athletes to be so competitive that they’ll do anything to win, yet we fault them when they choose to go play for a team that will help them win.

Leaving a team behind taints the legacy we have pre-created. Kevin Durant better win a championship, but he needs to do it in Oklahoma City where we’ve grown to love him! Dwyane Wade can retire when he wants, but he should play his whole career in Miami where they’ve given him so much!

Somewhere along the way, we decided to create legacies before they ever happened and evaluate them in real time.

Somehow we forget that the best thing about sports is the way they surprise us. Every. Single. Time.

Let’s all stop obsessing about Durant and Wade for a minute and think about the legacies of some other recent superstar athletes.

Take Kobe and Duncan — they’re the stories we want, right? The lifers who only wore one jersey, who succeeded from start to finish and went out on top.

But is that really true for both? The Lakers won just 65 of 246 games the last three years, and Kobe hasn’t played in the playoffs since 2012 — the year MVP Derrick Rose led the Bulls to the 1 seed while James Harden and Kevin Durant led OKC to the Finals for the first time.

Meanwhile Kobe and the Lakers have been a train wreck. How soon we forget! His inflated contract and his ball hogging and poor shooting alike have killed the Lakers for three years straight. He stayed too long and hurt the team, and not even one magical night at the end can change that.

Kobe isn’t the only superstar that stayed with his team forever only to see things end a bit sour. Troy Aikman’s Cowboys finished below .500 in three of his last four seasons. Patrick Ewing never did win with the Knicks and has the ignominy of being known as the Ewing Theory guy, named for teams that succeed after a star is gone. Dirk Nowitzki’s Mavs stumble into and out of the first round of the playoffs year after year.

Not every superstar has a fairy tale ending. In fact, precious few of them do — and that’s what makes guys like Duncan, Larry Bird, John Elway, and Derek Jeter so very special. They are the few guys that played for one team all the way and were successful right up to the end.

The list of athletes known for loyalty is littered with guys that ultimately carried the lovable loser tag. They were true to their team and gave it their best, but they never won the big one. We’re talking about Reggie Miller and John Stockton and Barry Sanders and Ernie Banks. And Jerry West, a man who had a useful opinion to offer Kevin Durant amidst this whole process.

Even the guys that stay have to have their legacy redefined. They’re “winners” because we decided to make an exception to the rule. They didn’t really win, but we decided they’re winners anyway. At least they didn’t leave, right?

But what about the guys that do leave?

It turns out there are a lot of those success stories too. There’s actually by far the most of those stories. There’s KG and Peyton and Shaq and Favre and ARod and Clemens and Bonds and Montana and Moss and the Big Unit and Borque and Selanne.

Heck, there’s LeBron too. We just rewrote his legacy for the umpeenth time. All these guys had a great career for one team then, believe it or not, became loyal to another new team and found success there too. RINGZ.

We sort of forget about these leave-and-find-success stories because there are so many of them. It’s actually the single most common career arc for a successful athlete.

In fact, it’s tough to come up with many stars that left a team and didn’t find success. And the few relevant examples are either because a player got injured (Pujols or Griffey) or because he waited too long and just wasn’t good enough anymore. You have to wonder if guys like Karl Malone or Charles Barkley or Steve Nash would leave earlier if they could do it all again.

It turns out that all legacies work. Some stars stay and succeed; some stay and sputter out. Many leave and find success elsewhere.

And that’s ok.

In the end, the fuss over loyalty and legacy is all a bit much.

The weirdest part? None of us operate under the idealized concepts of loyalty and legacy in any other area of our lives.

Loyalty? Loyalty is the sort of thing you believed in at age 23 before entering the real world. Get that first job and watch how quickly your coworkers exit around you. Sometimes they leave for a promotion or better pay. Sometimes the company moves on or downsizes. Sometimes it’s you that leaves.

Ultimately you can only be loyal to yourself. If your family or your finances or your happiness are your top priority, you’ll act accordingly. It’s your own version of loyalty.

As for legacy? We’re not living in the 1800s anymore. It used to be that if mom and dad ran the farm growing up, your legacy was already decided. You’d tend the farm as a kid and take over some day, passing on the family name and vocation from one generation to the next.

It’s 2016 now. You get to create your own legacy. You can do anything you want. You can live anywhere and try any job.

No one has pre-written your story. You get to surprise us all. You don’t have to live up to the expectations of your family or your friends or anyone else — only yourself. And actually, one of the hardest parts of becoming an adult is figuring that out.

Realizing that Golden State was the best option for Kevin Durant? That was easy enough for anyone to see.

But KD actually choosing to be loyal to himself, to create a legacy he wants instead of doing what fans or teammates desire?

That may have actually been the most grown-up decision Kevin Durant has ever made.

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